Where do you put all your HTML stuff on a home Linux server?

[Chris G]

I've been changing my mind and messing about with this for years and  
*still* haven't really come to a sensible final conclusion.  It's not
even that it matters all that much but I wish there was an obvious    
answer.


There are two basic alternatives, each with advantages and
disadvantages:-

1 - In your home directory

    Permissions are easy to deal with, no need to become root to edit
    web pages.

    But it means that, if the outside world has access, you have to be
    *very* careful with apache set up if you want to be sure only the
    right bits are visible to the outside world.

    You either have to use ~<user> in the URL or you have to add  
    symbolic links from apache's DocumentRoot.

    If there's more than one user (not in my case) using /home makes more
    sense.

    Backing up is easy as the HTML gets backed up with your home
    directory (though there might be bits in DocumentRoot you want to
    back up as well).


2 - In apache's DocumentRoot (/var/www/html in my case)

    Messier with permissions if you want to edit HTML without becoming
    root all the time.  Also not so convenient for editing even with  
    permissions set up OK as it's not in your home directory.

    Easier to make sure that any outside access can only see what you
    want to be seen.

    Cleaner/easier URLs without the need for symbolic links.

    Not really practical for multi-user but this doesn't apply for me.

    Need to back up separately from /home (though I suppose you could
    make /var/html a link across to the /home partition)


I keep a lot of quite dynamic (i.e. frequently changing) files as
HTML, or at least their content is web browsable, so the above issues
are important for me.

Does anyone have any comments, ideas, solutions?


-- 
Chris Green