How to automate deployment on Virtualmin Virtual Servers?

Virtualmin
1

I’m trying to setup a deployment system (Capistrano, Rocketeer, etc…) on my server based on Virtualmin.

I’ve seen that Virtualmin creates a user and a group with the name of the vserver and a home dir in wich you’ll set your files.

The owner group has only read permission and www-data is part of it.
The owner user obviously has complete access to the files under his folder.
Now the question: It’s not safe to run the deployment with root user so i want to create a deploy one that has write access to each vserver folder. I can’t add deploy user to the groups because ‘g’ has only read permission.

Question 1:

How can i solve this problem? Should i use ACL?

Question 2:

Is possible to automate the solution and not have to execute some operation each time a vserver is created?

2

Howdy,

Hmm, it seems like you’d have to jump through a few hoops to make that work.

That could work, but I’m wondering if maybe there’s a simpler way.

Would it perhaps be possible to use the Virtualmin API to help out?

There is both a command line API (which you can access by running the command “virtualmin”), and a remote API (which allows you to use HTTP to query the running Virtualmin process).

Perhaps rather than getting your tools to do what Virtualmin would otherwise be doing, you could instead have your tools communicate with Virtualmin, and have Virtualmin do it for you?

Here are some links that may help:

https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/developer/cli

https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/developer/http