How to automatically create an apache virtual host with Bash?

Question

About five years ago I have created the following Bash script to automate creation of apache virtual hosts.

#!/bin/bash

read -p "Have you created db credentials already?" yn
case $yn in
[Yy]* ) break;;
[Nn]* ) exit;;
* ) echo "Please create db credentials and then comeback;";;
esac

function read_and_verify  {
read -p "$1:" tmp1
read -p "$2:" tmp2
if [ "$tmp1" != "$tmp2" ]; then
    echo "Values unmatched. Please try again."; return 2
else
    read "$1" <<< "$tmp1"
fi
}

read_and_verify domain "Please enter the domain of your web application twice" 
read_and_verify dbrootp "Please enter the app DB root password twice" 
read_and_verify dbuserp "Please enter the app DB user password twice"

cat <<-EOF > /etc/apache2/sites-available/$domain_2.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@"$domain_2"
    ServerName ${domain_2}
    ServerAlias www.${domain_2}
    DocumentRoot $war/${domain_2}
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
EOF

ln -sf /etc/apache2/sites-available/"$domain_2".conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

I don't think that this is the best way to go, first since Apache was probably updated since then and syntax might be different nowadays and second, since parts of the code are unintuitive (low readability) and would like to know if there is any program I could use to automatically create Apache virtual hosts in a more standard and efficient way, yet stay with Bash (I don't use Ansible or similar tools).

How to automatically create an apache virtual host with Bash?

Answer 1

Yeah, your script looks pretty sane. Should still work – apache2 is extremely conservative in its config files.

Looking at your config, however, I'm not sure you even need to have a per-domain configuration, as the mod_vhost_alias module could just allow you to create a subdirectory for every domain you want to serve, and be done with it – these all seem to have essentially the same configuration. There's also a wealth of third-party apache modules that allow virtual host configurations, script and logging settings to be stored in databases instead of configuration files.

since parts of the code are unintuitive (low readability) and would like to know if there is any program I could use to automatically create Apache virtual hosts in a more standard and efficient way, yet stay with Bash (I don't use Ansible or similar tools).

Well, if you call an external tool, you're "leaving" bash if you will. Might as well use a tool that other people use for server administration automatisation, like ansible with one of the well-proven apache2 roles, locally. Nothing wrong with not writing everything yourself in bash script!

As for the approach you've chosen, as said, it's pretty reasonable. I might have instead written the template to a template file and streamed that file through sed to get a new config file, or just used jinja2 to do more complicated replacements.

Personally, I'd see a couple of application security anti-patterns in here. You're asking for domains & passwords being manually entered twice. Who does that? I hope these database passwords are randomly generated long strings, not just words that people think of on the fly.