chef apache2 permissions problem

gondo commented 11 years ago

i'm using chef recipes to install apache2, php. originally, i had problem with apache not being able to create new folders, as by default, apache2 runs as "www-data:www-data" i've solved this by adding nfs option to my syn_folder option config.vm.synced_folder "www", "/var/www/", :nfs => true in my Vagrant file but i still have a problem with AWS. i understand that i need to set apache2 to run as user who owns the files, but the problem is, that this user is different for different provider. by running vagrant locally, the user and group is vagrant:vagrant however when i use aws provider, the user is ubuntu:ubuntu (as this is default AWS user) now the problem is, that i dont know what user is used inside chef recipies, as chef is always run as root so my question is, is there anyway how to solve this? f.e. have special chef settings inside aws setting in vagrant file? or is it possible to pass/detect the user information inside chef recipe? (i've tried to check platform but its the same for both, ubuntu)

nickryand commented 11 years ago

You can change the owner:group from within a chef recipe with the execute block.

execute "fix permissions" do command "chown -R www-data:www-data" action :run only_if do File.exists?("/var/www") end end

nickd

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 9:58 AM, gondo notifications@github.com wrote:

i'm using chef recipes to install apache2, php. originally, i had problem with apache not being able to create new folders, as by default, apache2 runs as "www-data:www-data" i've solved this by adding nfs option to my syn_folder option config.vm.synced_folder "www", "/var/www/", :nfs => true in my Vagrant file but i still have a problem with AWS. i understand that i need to set apache2 to run as user who owns the files, but the problem is, that this user is different for different provider. by running vagrant locally, the user and group is vagrant:vagrant however when i use aws provider, the user is ubuntu:ubuntu (as this is default AWS user) now the problem is, that i dont know what user is used inside chef recipies, as chef is always run as root so my question is, is there anyway how to solve this? f.e. have special chef settings inside aws setting in vagrant file? or is it possible to pass/detect the user information inside chef recipe? (i've tried to check platform but its the same for both, ubuntu)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/issues/99 .

gondo commented 11 years ago

unfortunately that doesn't work for VirtualBox, you can not change ownership of rsynced files. i want to use the same setup and be able to run Vagrant locally as well on AWS.

gondo commented 11 years ago

also even if this would work, i dont want to change permissions or ownership of my web app files, as it would again cause problems with my local development and any local change to those files would overwrite this settings and i would have to re run chmod/chown

nickryand commented 11 years ago

I don't think I understand exactly what your trying to do. Do you have two separate Vagrantfiles? One for local VirtualBox and one for AWS?

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 4:51 PM, gondo notifications@github.com wrote:

also even if this would work, i dont want to change permissions or ownership of my web app files, as it would again cause problems with my local development and any local change to those files would overwrite this settings and i would have to re run chmod/chown

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/issues/99#issuecomment-19582678 .

gondo commented 11 years ago

here is what im trying to do:

have 1 Vagrant file
have couple of Chef recipes to setup server
run the web app from my local machine, so i can still edit it and develop locally via my IDE
be able to start Vagrant in VirtualBox (for online development)
be able to start Vagrant on AWS (for staging/preproduction testing)

what i have:

everything from above but in terms of setup

what is the problem:

my application doesnt work as it doesnt have permissions to create folders
Vagrant is running as vagrant:vagrant user in VirtualBox and my web app files are owned by vagrant:vagrant
Vagrant is running as ubuntu:ubuntu on AWS and my web app files are owned by ubuntu:ubuntu
Apache is running as www-data:www-data and does not have permissions to create files/folders in my web app
i can not change Apache user/group as chef is running as root and it doesn't know what user own's my application files

what i dont want to do:

chown/chmod my web application files. as if i would do this while running VirtualBox, this changes would be rsynced back to my local folder and would prevent my IDE to interact with it, or my IDE would change ownership/permissions of local files what would be rsynced to VirtualBox and would break functionality of my web app

question:

how to solve this?
is there a way how to pass User (who is used to rsynce my web app) into Chef?
is there a way how to set Chef variable just for AWS environment?

my current solution:

in my Vagrant file:

    chef.json = {
        :vmbox => config.vm.box
    }

in my recipe:

if node['hostname'] != node['vmbox']
    node.set['apache']['user'] = "ubuntu"
    node.set['apache']['group'] = "ubuntu"
end

mitchellh / vagrant-aws

chef apache2 permissions problem #99