Reliable Penguin

Sometimes on a website you want to have a folder inside the document root that has it's own FTP account. For example you might have a /news folder and you want your ad agency to be able to post articles to this folder but not access the rest of the website.

Unfortunately plesk does not provide facilities for having multiple FTP accounts on a single site under the document root. Here's a work around:

1. In Plesk, create a "Web User" in the desired domain. The web user will have a document root at:

/var/www/vhosts/domain.com/web_users/[username]

And the corresponding url will be:

http://domain.com/~[username]

Where username is the name that you assigned to the web user in Plesk. This is now your FTP account. Give the login to whoever needs it and let them upload content.

2. Next we'll use a rewrite rule to map the web user's document root into a folder of the main website as follows:

a. Edit (or create) /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/conf/vhost.conf

b. Add these lines to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule /[targetfolder](.*) /~[username]$1

where [targetfolder] is name that you wise to map [username] into.

c. Finally run:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a -v

and:

/sbin/service httpd reload

to make the apache changes take effect.

Now when you goto:

http://domain.com/[targetfolder]

you'll see the content in the [username] web user's home directory.