[FLOW3-general] Interesting experience with FLOW3 setup

["Christian Müller (Kitsunet)"]

Hi Visay,

generally I can't fully agree with the blog post about PHP handlers.
suPHP wasn't updated since 2009 and performance isn't really up to fcgi.
That said I never used suPHP because of this problems.

All in all FLOW3 is not fully intended for shared hosting (you don't 
have command line in most shared hosting offers), but you can run it if 
necessary.

Why the installation created so many processes in your first try I can 
only guess, but I think it was the compile step, which clearly does a lot.

On shared hosting the setfilepermissions script basically is useless 
unless you know the admin and he can run it for you. With suPHP you 
would set the file permissions to your user group of course, then it 
should work too.

It was already requested to make configuration in case of having Web/ 
not as domain root more clearly in the documentation so that will 
probably come at some point, but we cannot prepare for all possible 
server configurations, so if you point the domain to Web/ the routing 
should work out of the box, otherwise you need to adapt that to your 
environment as you found out "the hard way".

All in all I think it would be possible to run FLOW3 with suPHP but I 
would rather recommend fcgi. Actually I have it running on my server 
(which is configured for shared hosting) with fcgi. If you have the 
chance to try a bit more together with your admin, you could join the 
chat and ask. I would try to assist you in the right configuration.

Cheers,
Christian

On 14/11/11 16:10, Visay Keo wrote:
> 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