Today I was configuring a server running Postgres, Ruby, & Litespeed. It is a fairly easy setup that I run on numerous servers and it simply takes time to go through the motions to get everything up and running. There are a ton of steps so its highly likely that I miss one along the way. Today everything went smooth except for in one of the last steps where I start configuring virtual hosts in Litespeed I received an error. The error was stating that the path I was entering into the virtual host configuration did not exist. The error and the resolution are explained in detail below.

Litespeed Virtual Host Edition Error:

Error Text:
Input error detected. Please resolve the error(s).

Virtual Host Root Error Text:
Optional: You can set up a different VH_ROOT other than the default one
*path /home/web/site-root does not exist. Please create manually

The error was stating that /home/web/site-root did not exist however the directory definitely existed. I run Litespeed as the web user and web group and then have numerous sub directories underneath the /home/web directory with various ruby projects. I can then point virtual hosts to each individual ruby project and everything is nice and neat in /home/web. After a couple minutes of investigating I remembered that /home/anyuser is not typically used in this format so the permissions needed to be changed to allow the web server to read from the web directory or whatever user you have configured in this manner. Below is the default permissions of /home/web followed by the command to modify the permissions and what the directory should look like after modifying the permissions.

Default User Home Directory Permissions:

[root@adev home]# ls -alh
total 36K
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4.0K Nov 13 15:15 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4.0K Nov 12 14:41 ..
drwx------ 3 alex alex 4.0K Nov 13 12:59 alex
drwx------ 2 martin martin 4.0K Oct 28 16:50 martin
drwx------ 5 web web 4.0K Nov 13 15:39 web

Modify User Home Directory Permissions:

[root@adev home]# chmod 775 web

Modified User Home Directory Permissions:

[root@adev home]# ls -alh
total 36K
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4.0K Nov 13 15:15 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4.0K Nov 12 14:41 ..
drwx------ 3 alex alex 4.0K Nov 13 12:59 alex
drwx------ 2 martin martin 4.0K Oct 28 16:50 martin
drwxrwxr-x 5 web web 4.0K Nov 13 15:39 web

After modifying the directory permissions Litespeed will be able to read the directory and you should be able to configure the virtual host without issue. Even if you are not using a users home directory specifically if you receive an error similar to “Path not found” then it could be related to directory permissions if the directory actually does exist.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 5:13 PM and is filed under Errors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.