Question

I'm about to set up a hosted account that will include several domains with each having it's own TWiki installation. With my hosting service (Dreamhost), each domain is simply a separate directory within my user directory.

It recently occurred to me that it would be simpler to maintain them if I could use a single set of TWiki scripts, plugins, etc. to serve the separate domain installations.

In my naivite, I see a set up in which one domain would have a full TWiki installation but each of the other domains would have TWiki installations in which the bin, template, lib/TWiki, and lib/Algorithm directories were symlinks. The TWiki.cfg and TWiki pm files would be distinct for each installation.

Since the file ownership and name the scripts run under is the same across all domains, it would not seem that this would be an issue. The passwords for all domains would be stored in the same hwpassword file but I don't see why that would be a problem either.

Pushing this a bit further, it seems to me I could even use a symlink for the data/TWiki directory as well since I don't want folks messing with those topics anyway.

With this set-up, each domain would have it's own distinct set of webs and membership but I would only have one set of TWiki "guts" to maintain.

Does this seem like a crazy idea? Is there a obvious reason why this would not work that I'm missing?

Any feedback appreciated!

Environment

-- LynnwoodBrown - 03 Oct 2003

Answer

I suspect he-who-prefers-not-to-be-named had taken these sorts of thing into consideration when he was designing DataAndCodeSeparation, so it might be a feature of the forthcoming (hopefully next week) Owiki:Openwiki.AntelopeRelease. If not, I think his design could incoporate this feature pretty quickly. Give it a try - with the installer it should be pretty quick and painless to try.

FWIW I'd like to do this as well.

-- MartinCleaver - 14 Oct 2003

Just to report back, the setup I described above does work. For more discussion on this topic, see SharingInstallFilesBetweenSites.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 04 Jan 2005