On 08/03/2010 10:19 AM, Rob McBroom wrote:
> On Aug 3, 2010, at 10:40 AM, Igal Koshevoy wrote:
>
>   
>> The application was failing at startup because it couldn't write its own
>> log files, and now it's failing because it can't write its caches.
>>
>> Please give ownership of the "puppet-dashboard" directory and everything
>> in it to the same user, and grant this user read and write access to all
>> of this.
>>
>> For example:
>>  chown -R apache:apache /opt/puppet-dashboard
>>  chmod -R ug+rwX /opt/puppet-dashboard
>>     
> OK, that plus a restart of Apache seems to have brought the web interface 
> back. Thanks.
>   
Great.

> Now, some questions:
>
>   1. Is that a good idea; For the web server to have write access to the 
> application itself?
>   
This is normal for Ruby on Rails applications like Puppet Dashboard and
those written in some other web frameworks.

This isn't a big deal for typical Rails deployments because each app is
often run in a separate user account with write access to all its files,
and the apps' code is managed locally with something like git or
externally with something like Capistrano.

However, this design causes hardship to those trying to distribute such
apps as OS packages and annoys sysadmins because it intermingles
read-only source code with configuration and variable files. Rails
doesn't provide a straightforward way to separate these, although this
could be addressed with some surgery.

>   2. Why wasn’t this necessary with previous versions?
>   
All previous versions of Dashboard needed write access to the "db",
"log" and "tmp" directories. Writing to the "public" directory is new to
this version.

>   3. If it is necessary, should it be mentioned in the installation 
> instructions?
>   
Thanks for the suggestion, I've added issue #4455 to address this.

-igal

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