SOLVED Configure cPanel for non webhosting company

Hi cPanel Forums,

My company currently internally hosts 60+ PHP internally facing websites in 4 different environments. All of these are subdomains as in foo.internal-company-hosting.net, bar.internal-company-hosting.net, baz.internal-company-hosting.net.

And as we are in the process of re-architecting our systems, the company's IT has recently chosen cPanel as an engine/system for several reasons.

However, this leaves me with the job of transitioning from an old standard-ish LAMP stack setup without cPanel to a version using cPanel.

I had some time to play around and found it pretty easy just making a new user for each of these sites, as if we were selling an web-hosting account. It worked pretty seamlessly, but then that would create 60+ new users, meaning developers would need to either maintain another long set of passwords, or have some su/sudo powers just to get around into the sites. Not to mention our previous disk space hosting doesn't easily fit with the default website construction in user subdirectories.

I then tried to find a way to spin off parallel sites under one user, and ran into several smaller hiccups. Which left me with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

So, I really have 2 main questions here:

1] is there a way to 'by configuration' or 'by hand' ensure that websites are created under a known mount point /foobar rather than as subdirs under a user.

2] is there an easy way to add/spin off multiple subdomain sites under a single user.

I do have a few more automation style questions, but these are the two big ones.

Thanks,

 

Thanks for the direct link! I'll try this presently. Regarding the issues I had earlier, I'll chalk it up to me bumbling around if things go smoothly with this new info.

Ok, and I totally understand why a real hosting company and/or hosting re-seller would need to be careful with this. However, as I mentioned initially, we're not hosting per/se, and it's an internal server where only developers have access, so there really should be no security risk, and we can ensure that '/foobar' is owned by the appropriate user. Is there a non supported way we can tweak this? or are we going to have to build symbolic links all over the place?

 

I'll take a look, but I noticed (on a re-read):

Sorry what we need are sub-domains not domains, they're all on the same domain. Does that change any of your earlier answers?

I found a subdomain link from your first one and that seems to be going smoothly.

 

Excellent, Thanks to you cPanelMichael for your links and advise. I would mark this as resolved but I can't find a control for it.

To be clear for any future forum browsing:

To resolve #1: We chose to use a symbolic link from our mount point to replace the ~/<single-user>/public_html, then applying a chown to ensure user/group ownership was correct. Note that as Michael mentioned, while this works for us in our use case, it probably isn't a correct solution for many situations.

To resolve #2: For the process of making a new subdomain site, we used the Subdomain link, and the entire process including manually uploading and unzipping files, creating a db/db-user and restoring the db clocks in around 30 minutes. Which is fine for our needs.