Virtual Hosting Hosting for the new sysadmin – Apache – Postfix

This entry was posted by Wednesday, 23 June, 2010
Read the rest of this entry »

We have some users who own servers who dont want to fork out for automated systems like Plesk or Virtualmin, but don’t really want to deal with adding domains and email addresses all the time (and sometimes get lost)

I decided today after one such user emailed us to add another 3 domains and bunch of email addresses to write something simple to help him out, and thought I would share them with you.

I put the following in a plain text file in /root/adddomain.sh

#!/bin/bash
if [ ! $1 ];then
echo "Usage: $0 domainname.com"
exit 0
fi
 
echo Adding the virtualhost to apache
cat >/tmp/httpd.tmp < < EOF
 
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/CHANGEME/html
ServerName CHANGEME
ServerAlias www.CHANGEME
<directory "/var/www/CHANGEME">
allow from all
Options +Indexes
</directory>
 
 
EOF
cat /tmp/httpd.tmp | sed s/CHANGEME/$1/g >> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
 
echo Making the directory at /var/www/$1
mkdir -p /var/www/$1/html
 
echo reloading apache
/etc/init.d/httpd reload
 
echo Adding domain to mail
echo $1 /etc/postfix/virtual_domain # this was his postfix virtual domain name list

Then run

chmod +x adddomain.sh

Now I can add domains like this very easily

[root@hostname ~]# ./adddomain.sh
Usage: ./adddomain.sh domainname.com
[root@hostname ~]# ./adddomain.sh domain.co.nz
Adding the virtualhost to apache
Making the directory at /var/www/domain.co.nz
reloading apache
Reloading httpd:                                           [  OK  ]
Adding domain to mail
[root@hostname ~]#

Please note: do not add the ‘www’ part onto the domain name. That is done in the script itself where required.

Since he had set up virtual hosting in postfix, i then created another text file at /root/addmailuser.sh – this was so he could add email addresses easily and quickly. The contents were

#!/bin/bash
 
if [ ! $2 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 [username|destination] emailaddress"
exit 0
fi
 
if [ -z $(echo $1 | grep @) ];then
echo Looks like a username to me, adding the user
adduser -s /sbin/nologin $1
passwd $1
else
echo Looks like a redirect off site, adding it as such
fi
 
echo Adding the email address
echo $2  $1 >> /etc/postfix/virtual
 
echo Running postmap
postmap /etc/postfix/virtual
 
echo Reloading postfix
/etc/init.d/postfix restart

Again i run the chmod on it

chmod +x addmailuser.sh

This is how I can use it

[root@hostname ~]# ./addmailuser.sh
Usage: ./addmailuser.sh [username|destination] emailaddress 
[root@hostname ~]# ./addmailuser.sh julie.domain julie@domain.co.nz
Looks like a username to me, adding the user
Changing password for user julie.domain.
New UNIX password:
BAD PASSWORD: it is too short
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
Adding the email address
Running postmap
Reloading postfix
Shutting down postfix:                                     [  OK  ]
Starting postfix:                                          [  OK  ]
[root@hostname ~]#

Or I can use it to create an off site alias

[root@hostname ~]# ./addmailuser.sh james.someguy@gmail.com james@domain.co.nz
Looks like a redirect offsite, adding it as such
Adding the email address
Running postmap
Reloading postfix
Shutting down postfix:                                     [  OK  ]
Starting postfix:                                          [  OK  ]
[root@hostname ~]#

These were designed/written for Centos/RedHat based systems, let me know if you want it for Debian/Ubuntu based ones. Also, strictly speaking, things don’t need to be restarted, but it doesn’t hurt and is a good way of testing things work ok.
There is no error checking in either of these scripts, feel free to contribute patches/fixes 🙂

One Response to “Virtual Hosting Hosting for the new sysadmin – Apache – Postfix”

  1. The -i parameter for sed can be useful, making a change in place rather than building a pipe can make scripts look a bit nicer.

    eg ;
    sed -i ‘s/CHANGEME/$1/g’ /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf


Leave a Reply