Change Document Root with command lines

Question

I'm setting up an Amazon Web Service Stack and I'd like to configure the Document Root in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf which I currently do by modifying the document's DocumentRoot. I then reflect this change in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. Is it possible to make these changes with command lines as opposed to opening and editing files? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can do it with sed. I use following wrapper function, to make it more convenient:

replace_string () {
    while :; do
        case $1 in
               file=?*) local    file=${1#*=} ;;
            replace=?*) local replace=${1#*=} ;;
               with=?*) local    with=${1#*=} ;;
                     *) break                 ;;
        esac
        shift
    done

    sudo sed -i -- "s/$replace/$with/ig" $file
}

replace_string    file='/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf' \
               replace='.*DocumentRoot.*' \
                  with='DocumentRoot path-to-your-document-root'


replace_string    file='/etc/apache2/apache2.conf' \
               replace='.*DocumentRoot.*' \
                  with='DocumentRoot "path-to-your-document-root"'

Mind that user running this script should be capable of using sudo without a password.

Answer 2

If you have httpd.conf file

I don't know if this is supported by the documentation or not (I couldn't see reference to it) but I found that appending will replace previous directives.

I stumbled upon this experimentally after becoming disillusioned with the cocophony of sed, grep and awk scripts that usually accompany this kind of question (see Modify config file using bash script).

In my case, I have a file called httpd_changes.conf which looks like this:

DocumentRoot "/my/new/web/dir"
<Directory "/my/new/web/dir">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Then when I set up the webserver (in my case it's in my Dockerfile) I run this prior to starting the httpd service:

cat httpd_changes.conf >> /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

If you don't have a httpd.conf file

This isn't my situation but as far as I can tell you can just put a new config file in your conf.d directory. Those files are read in alphabetically (according to this page https://superuser.com/questions/705297/in-what-order-does-apache-load-conf-files-and-which-ones) which is obviously much nicer than my hack.

Answer 3

You could try the following:

sed "s,/var/www/html,/my/new/web/dir,g" /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

This will display the modification that would be made on your file.

The , is used as a custom delimiter to make the regex easier to read. This example with replace all occurences of /var/www/html with /my/new/web/dir.

Add the -i flag to actually modify the file:

sed -i "s,/var/www/html,/my/new/web/dir,g" /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf