Server Utilities
The previous version of these server scripts ran locally on your machine and ssh’d to the server you were after. This had some issues, the big was presuming the machine you were on had a ’NIX style environment, leaving the Windows users out in the cold.
Personally, I don’t any linux server admins that run windows on their machine, but it could happen. With that in mind (and making the code easier) I changed it over so they are now designed to run on the server itself and I try to keep things like the admin password out of the history.
So far the new shell scripts do user admin (including mysql), apache vhost creation, git checkouts and a work in progress ubuntu 10.04 LTS configuration script.
User Admin
The user.sh bash script has create and delete options only. As these commands can be damaging, there is also an echo only option, By using -e the commands are simply printed out and not actually run.
To try and keep the admin passwords out of the limelight and the history, the first thing the script does is request the root password (you can use another user other than root if you want), at this point it copies to an internal variable which is piped in to other commands along the way.
The process is very similar to that of the previous scripts after that point.
Creating a user
By using the -c flag you signify your desire to make a new user; the command would look something like this:
./user.sh -c USERNAME PASSWORD
With USERNAME being the name of the user you want to create and PASSWORD is the password for that user. As leaving the password in the history isn’t such a good idea, you can exclude that from the command and the script will ask you for it. This way, the command would look like this:
./user.sh -c USERNAME
By default the scripts use root as the user to do the mysql setup, this can be changed by using the -r flag:
./user.sh -c USERNAME -r
Once -r is set it will ask you an alternative user account to use. If you’re not sure about what will happen with any of the commands, just pass along the -e flag:
./user.sh -c USERNAME -r -e
All the commands will be echo’d out instead of being ran
The creation process makes a new group (via groupadd), then a new user (with useradd), creates a mysql database (matching the users name) and then finally generates an ssh key file.
Deleting a user
Deletion basically reverses everything the creation side of the script did. It’s quick and easy to run:
./user.sh -d USERNAME
By default this leaves the database and mysql alone (as you don’t want to accidentally wipe all your data!), but you can force it to with -k:
./user.sh -d USERNAME -k
Then you can kiss goodbye to your database and the user permissions along with the normal user deletion.
As with the creation -e will echo it out and not run
Vhosts
As these are normally web servers, this is a quick way to make a vhost for your newly created user. Again, create and delete options.
Creating a vhost
Very simple:
./vhost -c WEBSITE USERNAME
As you might of guessed, WEBSITE is the full server name – google.com – for example, and USERNAME is (if you hadn’t guessed) the user name.
It comes with a couple of extra options, -i can be handy. This changes the ip address used on the vhost from * to the servers ip address (via hostname -i):
./vhost -c WEBSITE USERNAME -i
If your running something like ubuntu and your vhost path is not the normal /etc/http2/conf.d/ you can change that as well:
./vhost -c WEBSITE USERNAME -i --vhost_dir PATH_VHOSTS
Where PATH_VHOSTS is the full path to the folder (with the trailing /), so something like /etc/apache2/conf.d/
If you are happy and want to make that vhost live, you can use --restart to restart apache:
./vhost -c WEBSITE USERNAME --restart
The file created is WEBSITE-apache-vhost.conf
Deleting a vhost
Just use the -d:
./vhost -d WEBSITE
Again, you can make use of --restart if you are sure about it.
GiT setup
Most occasions you need to deploy your site to your newly created user, this lets you pull in from a git repo, but does presume that in the case of private repos you’ve given the new user access to the repo.
Once you have, just run this to set it up:
./git USERNAME ORIGIN BRANCH
Can you guess what USERNAME is? That’s right, the user you want to fetch the git repo with. The script makes use of su -c to run the git setup.
ORIGIN is a bit complicated, its the web accessible path that git can fetch the repo from, something like git://website.com/user/project.git, see the git docs for more info.
BRANCH is the git branch you want to checkout to; in the case of these scripts it would be on-server
There is also an optional parameter that you can pass in to place the repo in a sub-folder of the user, rather than directly on the users home. For example, if you are using public as the base of your project you can run:
./git USERNAME ORIGIN BRANCH public/
That will checkout your repo into public subfolder..
./git USERNAME ORIGIN BRANCH public/more/depth/
The bash makes use of mkdir -p, so go as deep as you like.
Ubuntu setup
To speed things along, I threw together most of the commands used for setting up a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for running a typical LAMP stack.
The Files
All these scripts are sitting over on my github project page
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