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nine-manage-vhosts with multi-user

Introduction​

On managed servers, Nine provides you with the CLI tool nine-manage-vhosts to manage websites. Using nine-manage-vhosts you can create additional users.

This article describes how to use nine-manage-vhosts user management.

User management​

To increase security for web applications, they can be separated from each other with separate system users. When ordering the server, Nine creates the user www-data by default, using nine-manage-vhosts you can create additional users as needed.

With the user management of nine-manage-vhosts users are managed as follows:

www-data@server:~ $ sudo nine-manage-vhosts user <action>...

The available actions are create, update, remove and list. The latter outputs a list of the currently existing users:

www-data@server:~ $ sudo nine-manage-vhosts user list

NAME        | HOMEDIR
------------|------------------
www-data    | /home/www-data
www-example | /home/www-example

When creating (create) or updating (update) a user, three password-related options are available:

www-data@server:~ $ sudo nine-manage-vhosts user create www-example --no-password
www-data@server:~ $ sudo nine-manage-vhosts user create www-example --ask-password
www-data@server:~ $ sudo nine-manage-vhosts user create www-example --password=<password>

With the --no-password option, no password is set and the user cannot log in via SSH or SFTP. This is useful if you want to disable SSH/SFTP login in favor of FTP access.

The --ask-password option prompts for a password, using --password a password can be specified directly on the command line. The latter allows automating the creation of additional users.

Set up VirtualHost under a specific user​

A VirtualHost can be assigned to a user during creation. For this purpose, the --user option must be used:

www-data@server:~ $ sudo nine-manage-vhosts virtual-host create example.org
--user=www-example

In this example, the VirtualHost is created with the domain example.org under the user www-example in the folder /home/www-example/example.org.

Access all other users with www-data​

The user www-data acts as a kind of "super-user". www-data is used to create vhosts and other users (nine-manage-vhosts), to create databases (nine-manage-databases) or to access data backups (nine-backup) or database backups.

Since access by passwords should be avoided as much as possible, we have given the user www-data the possibility to switch to other user accounts.

For example, an SSH private key can be stored for a newly created user without having to create or share a password for the user.

Change user​

As user www-data you can execute the wrapper nine-su using sudo to be able to switch to another user account:

www-data@server:~ $ whoami
www-data
www-data@server:~ $ sudo nine-su www-example
www-example@server:~$ whoami
www-example
www-example@server:~$

The wrapper does not accept any other parameters besides the username (www-xyz).