I have an application, part of which is implemented as a web application (the core part is implemented in a usual manner). The serving component is a usual PHP application (it also uses Zend Framework and MySQL as database) and runs on standard Apache installations our team found in modern Linux distributions without any special tuning.
The question is, what exactly should happen when the user invokes make install, i.e. compiles and installs the application from source? There are several options, and I have doubts which way to adopt.
Install to the directory where the rest of application goes, make user manually copy files to the web server's directory.
Make user specify server directory during the installation procedure (such as
server_prefix=/path/to/srv make install).Install to the directory where the rest of application goes, and make user symlink from his or her web serving directory.
Something else?
Note that not only the way of installation should be convenient to users, but also it should be fairly easy to update the web component when sources change (although it's not the first priority). Also, how should the issue of the diversity of web servers and user preference in choosing one be addressed?