General
This is the basic information for the website account.
Name
The website account’s unique identifier within the OTDI Web Hosting system.
Manager
This is the primary individual who makes decisions about who has access to the website. He or she is typically a dean or upper-level manager who has authority to speak for the organization that the website represents. It is typically not one of the day-to-day support admins.
Description
A brief description of the website being served from this account.
Notify Email
A list of email addresses that are notified when the OTDI needs to contact someone about the account. (Outage notifications, security issues, etc.)
Primary URL
The primary URL for the website.
Secondary URLs
List of all additional domain names that should be routed to this website account. This is useful for combining websites, migrating to a new URL, or setting up a development URL while the primary is going through the approval process.
Subsites
These are other OTDI Web Hosted accounts who have agreed to publish content as a subdomain of your URL. They manage their own content in their own accounts and must point their Primary URL to your domain/subdomain, but here you can choose who publishes under your domain.
Clear Cache / Restart Website
This button performs a dual function. It performs a rolling restart of any containers associated with your account & clears your containers’ cache on our ingress Controller.
Webroot
The full path to where your website account is stored on the servers. This is useful for SSH users or websites that require you to tell them exactly where they live on the filesystem.
Space Used
The amount of storage space used by your site’s files.
Env Configs
Add, remove, and edit environment variables.
Image
Decides the platform Web Hosting will configure your account to run on. Most websites run a CMS like Drupal or WordPress. If so, this should be set to one of the PHP images. (Preferably the highest version known to work with your application) Other sites run on Node.js or Ruby on Rails, for which you’ll want to select one of the other available options. If you need an image which is not shown in the Dashboard, please contact us.
Mounts
Used to mount a file system outside of your environment to a folder inside of your Webroot, so your users and programs can access them like local files. This setup is unusual, has limitations, and can break your application if applied incorrectly. Please contact us if you need this function.
Environment Variables
Env Variables are dynamic values that can wield considerable influence over the behavior of your application. This is a good place to define variables outside of your code, and available on startup. Entries here consist of assignment expressions, one per line, as: NAME = value
Server Options
The list of options and features that are available for the website.
Please Note! Changes to these settings can take 30 minutes to apply.
Select Business Type
Account owner’s type of business unit. These are for our statistics and reporting only and doesn’t affect the functionality of your site. You can often figure out this value by the official name of your unit. (i.e., The Office of the CIO) The default value is ‘Other’, but you can choose from:
- Other
- College
- Department
- Office
- Student Organization
- Affiliate
Generate File Listing of Directories That Do Not Have an Index File
In the absence of an index file (index.html, index.php, etc.) the default behavior of the Web Hosting servers is to deny the user access. This option instead enables the automatic index pages where the users instead see the list of files and subdirectories that are available.
PHP: Enable Code Profiling for Debugging
This option enables the PHP hierarchical profiler (aka xhprof) that was created by Facebook. It supports embedding powerful profiling support into a website for debugging and speed tuning the code. See its PHP manual section for more details.
PHP: Enable Error Logging
Creates a PHP-specific error log in the website’s log directory. This can sometimes catch errors and warnings that do not make it into the standard error log file.
PHP: Enable Session Cookies
This allows PHP to create cookies for its session support. This is a very commonly used feature of PHP but could also be considered user-tracking by other countries. We therefore support disabling them if you wish to.
PHP: Increase The Maximum Number of Permitted OPcache Files
The ‘Increase’ option is currently unavailable. OPcache is enabled in Web Hosting and is set at: OPcache.max_accelerated_files = 20,000 OPcache.max_file_size = 10,485,760.
PHP: Opcache.Validate_Timestamps Disabled To Preserve Cache
When a PHP script loads, it’s processed into a form that the server can execute. That processed result is also stored in an Opcache to allow its reuse. By default, though, it is only allowed to live in that cache for 10 seconds before the file needs to be loaded from the filesystem and processed again. This option allows you to completely disable that expiration, so the cached result lives indefinitely. (Essentially until the Apache service is restarted)
This can greatly speed up a website as more and more of its scripts are loaded into cache and don’t involve hitting storage. The downside is that you need to manually flush this cache before any modifications to your website’s PHP will take effect. (bug fixes, code updates, etc.) This can be done using the “Clear PHP Cache” button in the “General” tab of the control panel.
This feature is not recommended for development and test sites as they tend to update frequently. It is useful for production sites, however, where changes are infrequent and typically deployed all at once.
Shibboleth: Enable Group Management System Support For This Account
This instructs Web Hosting’s Shibboleth SP to use the Group Management System (GMS) for Authorization instead of the normal Shibboleth IdP. For this to work, you'll also need a GMS Service Account setup & Group Definitions enabled through the IT Security Services Group. And finally, you'll need a properly formatted .htaccess file. For more information on using GMS in Web Hosting, please checkout Using the OSU Group Management Service.
Shibboleth: Use The Alumni IdP Instead Of The Usual One
There is a 2nd Shibboleth identity provider available on campus for authenticating alumni accounts. This alters the website to send users to it instead of the usual IdP meant for current students/staff/faculty.
Databases
This lists all the databases & database user accounts associated with your website account. It also offers a convenient way to create new ones, delete old ones, and edit existing ones.
Editing
At the top of the page is a link to a hosted instance of phpMyAdmin which allows for web-based control of the databases. (1st login is standard Shib, 2nd is the database account user & password)
Encryption
Encrypted connections are also available for the database. The server’s certificate was signed with one of the CA’s from this bundle if you wish to set up verification.
Restore
Every day, a snapshot is taken of your files that includes a database backup. These snapshots are held in an off-site location for 14 days. For full instructions on how to use this service, view this KB Document.
Get Snapshots
This allows you to recover one of those snapshots. The restored files do NOT overwrite your existing files and appear in your site directory above your /htdocs/ directory.
Get Restore Statuses
As the name implies, this shows you the status of all current & former snapshot recovery requests.
Rewrite Rules
This section allows you to include Apache mod_rewrite rules in your primary server configuration. This typically has a faster response time than an .htaccess file and can be used in situations where local files are not an option. (i.e.: Your web application overwrites your .htaccess files)
The details for writing these rules are on Apache’s webpage for mod_rewrite. They’re extensive and complex, so we’ll only cover a few basics here. Please Note! Rules requiring ‘RewriteCond’ are not supported here.
Enter Regex
This is the regular expression used to match URLs that you want the rule to apply to. It only includes the full path to the file requested and does not include domain, anchors, or any GET variables that may follow. The string to match includes the leading slash except for the empty URL case. (“/” will never work – it will just be an empty string instead)
Enter Redirect
This is the target all matching URLs will be sent. Both back references to the match string and full URLs are valid entries.
Enter Flags
These flags determine the way Apache applies the rule. A typical flag set includes [L,R=301,NC] but they can be quite extensive, and are often used for entirely different purposes like setting environment variables. For a complete flag list, see Apache’s documentation on RewriteRules.
Webhooks
This allows a website to be linked to a git-based repository so that its various features such as versioning, multiple branches, etc. can be leveraged. We suggest the use of the University Code Repository; however, this works just as well with GitHub. For full details, view this KB Document.
SFTP
This is the list of users who can connect to the website account via SFTP. These users can add, remove, and manipulate files on the website. You can also add & remove SFTP users. For instructions on using this service, view this KB Document.
Add New SFTP Account: Username
Entries are users’ name.# accounts and instructions for using SFTP can be found here.
Add New SFTP Account: chroot
Not all users need access to everything. By setting the chroot to the relative path within your website account, you can restrict them to just the sections they’re allowed to change. For example, setting someone’s chroot as ‘/’ gives them full control of the site, but making it ‘/htdocs/blog’ restricts them to http://yourwebsite.osu.edu/blog/ only.
SFTP SVC
This is a list of the SFTP ‘Service Accounts’ associated with the site. These are not normal SFTP accounts, but rather special accounts for programmatic file transfers. This type of access is unusual, but sometimes necessary. Instructions for use can be found in this KB Article.
Shell
Users listed in this section are allowed to connect directly to the Web Hosting system via an SSH shell. This is the highest level of access and should be limited only to Power Users with UNIX / Linux familiarity that cannot do what they need to do via SFTP. Instructions for use can be found in this KB Document.
Admins
These individuals have access to make almost any change to a website you can imagine. They can even add more admins. The one exception is that they cannot change the site manager or affect his/her access. If a change needs to be made to the site manager, then please contact us for help.
Need More Information?
Please do not hesitate to ask.
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