Well, I just finished migrating all my webapps on my server to using the ‘vhosts’ flag. Which, really isn’t that many — just my blog, trac, and internal stuff. For the longest time I put off using vhosts for a couple of reasons. The main one was I believe it’s almost always simpler to install web applications by just downloading them, unpacking them in your public_html, writing the config file and go from there instead of having the system install it to /var/foo/la-la/web/apps/domain.com/version-52.839.12/htdocs and then not being able to find anything. Plus, I was never too fond of vhosts either, because to install stuff you have to do something like this: webapp-config -I -h wonkabar.org -d phppgadmin phppgadmin 3.5.4.
In all fairness though, there was nothing wrong with the ebuilds, its just that I’m really picky about my apache + php + webapps installs. I used to install apache and php manually for a LONG time by myself. Then one day I finally started using the apache ebuilds, but would still install PHP5 manually. It wasn’t actually until maybe two months ago that I finally switched over to using the php ebuilds. Part of the reason there was I didn’t like the old way of installing (the whole dev-php/php and dev-php/mod_php being separate packages, mostly), and partly because I always wanted or needed the very latest version. I’ve already got a number of scripts at home and at work that depend on PHP 5.1. The new dev-lang/php script is much better though, and I’m using it on all my servers except one, I think, which I just haven’t bothered to swtich over yet. And now, vhosts was the last tool of the pack that I wasn’t using.
I have to admit, I’m starting to get used to it and actually like it. Today it’s to the point where it’s making things easier to install that way, and not nearly as hard to remember as before where all the files are being put.
So, if you’re looking for a LAMP stack that’s highly configurable, you might want to give Gentoo another look. It’s just getting better all the time. 🙂
Of course, I should go on record as always recommending Postgres over MySQL, so I guses that would be LAPP. GLAPP if you add Gentoo to the mix. Ok, I’ll stop.