LAMP: How do I set up http://myservername.com/~user access?

Question

Been trying to Google this, but I can't figure out good search terms to find any info about what I need, since I don't really know what it's called.

I'm pretty much being thrown to the wolves to figure out how to set up a LAMP server. We had someone who knew how to do it, he set one up and then quit. It was set up so that when I went to "http://{myservername}.com/~travis" it showed the contents of my /home/travis/public_html folder. This worked fine, then we lost power and the server restarted (I know, battery backup, but this is a dev server in a dev building so it's OK). Now, the browser can't find that URL.

I also need to know how to set this up on a new server, so instead of wasting time diagnosing this problem (probably just something dumb I did messing with settings or something), I really need to know how to set this up from scratch.

Answer 1

In Apache it's called mod_userdir.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_userdir.html

Just the one config directive, as long as mod_userdir is loaded. To mimick your old setup, it should be:

 UserDir public_html

Assuming your users homedirs are all in /home

(Edit) It's a little different in Apache 2.2. Here's the link to those docs: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_userdir.html

But the config is exactly the same:

UserDir public_html