Configure Apache to use different Unix User Accounts (www-data) per Site.

Question

An Apache 2.x Webserver with default configurations from the ubuntu/debian repositories will use the www-data unix account for apache2 processes handling web requests. Assuming that apache is serving two different sites (domain1.com and domain2.com), is it possible for apache to use unix user www-data1 when handling requests to domain1.com, and use unix user www-data2 when handling requests to domain2.com? The motivation is to isolate the code for each domain name from one another.

Answer 1

Take a look at suEXEC.

Answer 2

suPHP is also a nice thing to look into:

"suPHP is a tool for executing PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners. It consists of an Apache module (mod_suphp) and a setuid root binary (suphp) that is called by the Apache module to change the uid of the process executing the PHP interpreter."

-http://www.suphp.org/