Using Alias in Apache ONLY if local directory not present?

Question

Hey all,

We're running a reseller web host, and aliasing a particular directory for ALL the sites within. This is all happening through WHM/Cpanel, which could possibly complicate my question.

1. We want all hosts to run their "/concrete" directory through a shared location on the server. This is working fine by adding "Alias /concrete/ "/usr/local/share/concrete5/concrete-latest/concrete/" to the apache include editor in WHM.

2. However, if a local concrete/ directory exists within the particular webroot of the virtual host, we'd rather use that than "/concrete" globally. It would also be nice if we could make this alias change in the context of the virtual host, within WHM (and I haven't found a great way to modify virtual host sections in WHM without hacking a file that I don't believe we're supposed to hack.)

Thoughts?

Answer 1

A primitive, although probably quite effective solution might be to forget about the Alias directive and to simply rely on a symlink. A little shell script that creates those symlinks for you will simply fail if there is already something present that is called 'concrete'.