Installation on Linode file permissions

[antknight]

Why is it that when I install PW locally on MAMP the site-default folder is renamed automatically to site and file permissions are set correctly  but when i install on Linode I have to manually rename site-default and adjust file permissions? 

Something to do with my server set up?

[teppo]

It's all about not giving web server (in Ubuntu systems most commonly user "www-data") write access to anything it doesn't strictly speaking need it to. Web server is in direct interaction with outside world and can be tricked to do things on behalf of malicious users. This can be partly avoided simply by not letting it do any more harm locally than is absolutely necessary.

Thus it's a good thing that it doesn't have that access by default. If it had (ie. you didn't need to set it during install or right after downloading / cloning install package), I'd be very worried, 'cause that would mean that your web server has full write access not only to /site-default/ but also the directory containing it (and who knows what else.)

Obviously locally things are a bit different

[antknight]

I'm glad it's not something I have done wrong, setting up a web server is no easy task. Well, this helps a lot but still, why can't it be simple?

Buy some hosting. Put website on hosting. Type in domain name you want to use. Type in email addresses you want to use. Go to homepage...it works! Simple

[diogo]

If you want things to be like that, then Linode is not the best choice...

[teppo]

Buy some hosting. Put website on hosting. Type in domain name you want to use. Type in email addresses you want to use. Go to homepage...it works! Simple

I agree that they (Linode) could simplify things a bit for "the common user." The way their service currently works is a bit rough on newcomers.

Then again, the whole point of VPS (or dedicated) hosting is that you're in charge, you decide what to install (and what not to install) and how installed applications should be configured, so that's probably not very high on their list. Not to mention that it's a good idea to know how your environment is set up and their manuals are really quite helpful

Still, offering an installation package for "common web server needs" -- Apache, MySQL, perhaps PHP / Python / Ruby preinstalled would make sense to me.

As a slightly related note, just read an article regarding certain shared hosting provider, and right now I'm even more convinced than before that shared hosting just isn't worth it. I mean.. it's kind of OK if your service isn't going to be very important or contain any "private" or "classified" information, but I would never recommend one of these to a client.

[antknight]

@diogo Is there anything like that?

I like the idea of using a VPS rather than shared hosting. The only thing that gets me is using terminal to set everything up, you can't get an overview of what is installed and if I did something wrong I would have no idea how to fix it. 

[diogo]

Not that I know. But Linode is on the opposite extreme. My server is on Linode, and I love it exactly because of how much I learned setting things up.

[apeisa]

Well, managed VPS is one option. There you can ask hosting company to configure the server for you. Servint (their vps: http://www.servint.net/vps.php) seems to be great choice and also what Ryan & ProcessWire recommends: http://processwire.com/servint/.