[FLOW3-general] Interesting experience with FLOW3 setup

[Visay Keo]

Hi,

First of all I'm sorry for the long text, but it might be interesting 
for you to read through. It's about my experience removing TYPO3 4.5 
from my personal website and installing FLOW3 instead.

I got my hosting upgraded to PHP 5.3 today and first thing I did was to 
install FLOW3 and test if everything is fine. Below is the list of thing 
I have noted:

1- ssh to the server and run "./flow3 core:setfilepermissions visayinf 
nobody nobody" return the message:
-------------------
This command must be called as super user. Use 'sudo' or run as root.
FLOW3 File Permission Script
-------------------
How can the server admin give me the sudo access? It won't be possible, 
but this is temporarily resolved in the third point.

2- The default documentroot is pointed to public_html so I had to called 
the page by http://mydomain/Web/ but it was just loading forever and the 
problem was that the installations created hundreds of processes (nearly 
500) and killed the server.

3- Then I asked the server admin to run the setfilepermissions command 
for me (he's a nice guy and always helpful I have to say). Calling the 
page again, no loop of processes but end up with the message
-------------------
Application Error

The FLOW3 application could not be launched.
-------------------

4- Checking somewhere in the log (by the server admin) found:
-------------------
SoftException in Application.cpp:256: File 
"/home/visayinf/public_html/Web/index.php" is writeable by group
-------------------
Then we realized that the server is configured to use suPHP (more info 
below)

5- To make it works, he needs to change the php handler to DSO, re-run 
the setfilepermissions command and called the page
-------------------
Not Found

The requested URL /index.php was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use 
an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
-------------------
This is now better because at least it redirected to 
http://mydomain/Web/flow3/welcome

6- Changing the apache config to point document root to the Web/ folder 
finally we got the Getting Started page "Welcome to FLOW3" which is cool :-)

7- Now it works but it looks like FLOW3 package requires the server 
settings that we really don't want to have for this server setup as DSO 
can cause a lot of issues with permissions for the shared hosting.

What the admin say is the he cannot believe the FLOW3 package cannot 
work with suPHP. He gave me some info DSO, "it is one of the most 
popular PHP handlers. When server uses DSO, php scripts are run as the 
web server (nobody). It is a fast handler but causes problems when the 
web browser needs to write to disk - you need to set proper permissions 
then. It's OK for a custom server but not very convenient for shared 
hosting where users would like to have packages for other CMS."

"Under suPHP, scripts are run as the owner of the account so they can 
write to the disk without a problem.  suPHP, however, does not accept 
write permissions for users that are not owners of the account (eg nobody)."

"More info about suPHP 
http://blog.servint.net/2011/10/28/the-tech-bench-all-about-php-handlers/"

I'm not expert in server configuration but I post these here for those 
who may be interested in doing something to fix it.

Kind regards,
Visay