PHP not parsing outside of /var/www

[latitudehopper]

I have some software installed that symlinks from /var/www/xxxxx to pages elsewhere.

I can't see how to get PHP to parse these files, it only seems to do it within /var/www

I am sure this is obvious to someone smarter than me!

Any ideas?

[latitudehopper]

An update....

It is parsing now in the same folder but only the file i create. The softwares files still insist on downloading instead. Same user:group for all.

[zombykillah]

Ain't it finding the file, or ain't it running the script and instead showing it to you?

[smilingfrog]

One thing you could try to do would be to configure apache to look at the pages elsewhere rather than symlinking from /var. It's probably a PHP configuration issue. More information would be useful.

[velikij]

For a Debian or Ubuntu or related distro, look for an example in /etc/apache2/conf.d/apache2-doc - this provides an alias allowing access as Apache HTTP Server Version 2.2 Documentation - Apache HTTP Server to the actual manual directory, and then allows symlinks under that directory.

Alias /manual /usr/share/doc/apache2-doc/manual/

<Directory "/usr/share/doc/apache2-doc/manual/">
Options Indexes FollowSymlinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
AddDefaultCharset off
</Directory>

The FollowSymlinks directive is what you want.

[velikij]

Another related issue is enabling PHP in user directories (like http://myserver/~mylogin/somefile.php)

For this you should enable php and userdir in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled, using the a2enmod utility or the ln command to link to the module in /etc/apache2/mods-available.

THEN, in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/, comment out the lines below:

# To re-enable php in user directories comment the following lines
# (from <IfModule ...> to </IfModule>.) Do NOT set it to On as it
# prevents .htaccess files from disabling it.
# <IfModule mod_userdir.c>
# <Directory /home/*/public_html>
# php_admin_value engine Off
# </Directory>
# </IfModule>
</IfModule>

and restart Apache2