host web page and softaculous apps at the same time

[dlane]

Hello, I'm new to helio host and public web hosting in general, but have many services hosted on my home network. On that LAN server, I just set up each service to use a different port, and have no problem with several of them running web interfaces on one IP address.

With helio host, I used softaculous to install a couple of apps. The installation settings ask where to put them and suggest a sane folder. Good, so those don't collide or conflict. I installed two and they both worked fine at their respective folders. The root index.html spot showed a non-navigable file/folder list.

It's not critical for me, but would be nice to replace the file/folder list with a simple website that links to the other apps. I used the sitejet builder, half-filled out a template and published it to see what would happen. I was not surprised that this wiped out the apps. Now the sitejet site appears on the root index.html and the apps addresses don't work.

I wondered if installing the apps afterward would work and tried that, but softaculous complains the apps are already installed. Maybe its records show that, but I think it's wrong. I pressed "update" on the disk usage stats to get a sense of whether disk use went down, but it took longer than I wanted to wait to update. The installation folders for the apps are gone.

1. Is it possible to host a few softaculous apps and a regular website at the same time? Is there some trick to do this?

2. I assume there's a way to reset softaculous' installation records and force it to reinstall apps it already installed but I overwrote?

 

[KazVee]

1. I just tested this on my account the quicker way, with 2 random Softaculous apps installed into folders (since subdomains can take up to 2 hours to fully work.) I installed Drupal in 'domain.helioho.st/drupal' folder and phpBB inside 'domain.helioho.st/phpbb'. This left my 'httpdocs' folder free for me to create my own 'index.html' file and just add links to both folders, so I can have a homepage on my domain and link it to my apps installed in folders on my domain.

If you prefer you could request that we add subdomains for you, and install the Softaculous apps into those. Then you'd just link from your regular website to the subdomains for the app you want to link to. Some apps really don't like being installed into subdomains though, so you may need to do some trial and error for this to make sure it works with whatever you plan to install. 

2. Inside Softaculous, at the top right, the 5th icon from the left looks like a filing box, when you hover your mouse over you should see 'All Installations'. If you click on that, it'll show you everything you have installed in Softaculous for that domain. You can click on the little red trashcan icon to delete anything you need to, and reinstall. There's also a pencil icon to edit installation details that you could try. (I've never used the edit feature myself, because I personally prefer a delete and reinstall approach.)

Edited to add: I've never used Sitejet, so I'll play around with that next. I don't understand why it'd have overwritten your 2 apps, but I'll see what happens to my test installs next and do a little more digging.

[KazVee]

18 hours ago, dlane said:

I wondered if installing the apps afterward would work and tried that, but softaculous complains the apps are already installed. Maybe its records show that, but I think it's wrong.

I had this happen too, I uninstalled Drupal and selected all 3 options to Remove Directory, Remove Database, and Remove Database User, to make sure it was a complete uninstall. However when I went to reinstall Drupal, after hanging a long time at the 95% mark, it told me something about things already existing (I forget the exact message). To get around this, I had to go into Custom Install > Advanced Options and change the Database Name and Table Prefix to something else. The 'already exists' message might have been because we were trying to reinstall right away. On the hosting servers, Apache is restarted every 2 hours and might do some cleanup processes at that time. We might not have gotten the 'already exists' message if we'd tried after the server restart, but I can only speculate.

I got things to work in the order below, but it's not a good long-term plan because it involves never updating the Sitejet page ever:
1. Use Sitejet and add links to domain.helioho.st/drupal and domain.helioho.st/phpbb which do not exist yet.
2. Install Drupal into /drupal and phpBB into /phpbb folders.
3. Everything works fine until you want to update the Sitejet site and republish it, because the publish will wipe out the /drupal and /phpbb folders. 😒

It depends how much you want to use Sitejet instead of making your own custom index.html page I guess. Sitejet is definitely the culprit here.

I've just created subdomains for Drupal and phpBB on my test account, and I'll repeat the steps to see if a Sitejet update and republish will wipe things out in the subdomain folders, too. It takes 2 hours for subdomains to work fully, but I'll test more later today.

[KazVee]

Subdomains worked for the apps I tested (Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, and Grav) so it may be a solution that works well for you.

I installed Sitejet on my main domain, and installed Drupal and phpBB into separate subdomains I'd made for them. Then, when I updated the Sitejet website, even though it did give me the "Are you sure you want to remove files in the document root of your domain.helioho.st domain in order to publish the website?" warning message, I clicked on the "Yes, remove" button and proceeded with the publish. When I went back to to check on my apps in their subdirectories, they were still fine. 

I also uninstalled the apps out of the subdirectories, reinstalled them, and made a bunch of updates to my Sitejet site on the main domain. I also uninstalled those 2 apps and installed Joomla and Grav in my subdomains instead, then updated Sitejet a bunch more, and the apps in their subdomains were still fine. 

If you'd like to try with apps in subdomains, let us know the subdomain names you want, and we can add them for you. 

Before adding subdomains though, just to remove any possible residual install/uninstall/config files, you might want to ask for an account reset first. Then after the account is reset back to defaults, you could ask us to add subdomains for you. This is optional, but I only mention it because that's what I'd do to start with a clean slate. 

21 hours ago, dlane said:

The root index.html spot showed a non-navigable file/folder list.

Edit to add: I forgot to comment on this earlier. That feature is called Directory Indexing (or Directory Listing). If you don't want to see the list of files, you can create your own empty index.html file inside the httpdocs folder and it'll just show a blank page instead of the folders/files listings. You can read more about Directory Indexing here: https://wiki.helionet.org/tutorials/plesk/create-website#directory-index 
 

Edited December 16 by KazVee
Added info on Directory Indexing