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, 2024 by KazVee
Added info on Directory Indexing

[dlane]

Thank you so much for your extensive testing and very helpful replies!

I didn't see them until now because I must not have email notifications set up and I put this project aside.

Since SiteJet is the problem and there's no particular reason I used it, I will use something else. I only need a static single page website so am looking at the options mentioned in another thread on lower resource alternatives to Wordpress: https://wiki.helionet.org/WordPress#WordPress_Alternatives (old wiki links don't work?) The file listing when there's no site installed is fine, I just mentioned it to describe what was happening with nothing installed there.

I think editing the index.html directly seems the simplest, especially now that I connected to the site with FTP. Since I'm older than the web, when I think of making a webpage, I think of using an editor on my computer, then uploading it to the server. That alternatives list makes a point that Publii "is local" i.e. on your personal device? Since the wiki is about a server, that's not 100% clear to me and it seems some of the other options also run on the editor's computer and not the server. But some do run on the server, but are not in Softculous. That's all a different question, but is where I am now.

Part of the reason I put this project aside is that I paid for a customization to Easy!Appointments and was waiting for that to be finished. When it was, I initially tried to copy the files to the server using the file manager GUI. That was going to take many hours. Instead I copied the zip file then unzipped on the server, over top of the Softculous installation of Easy!Appointments, reasoning that I wanted to keep the dependencies and not uninstall E!A. That may or may not have worked. I have encountered errors that sound related to the customization so I'm in contact with the author about that. Now that I'm getting closer to the real set up I should revisit this site interaction question, since I may want to reinstall and/or reset to convert to a static site.

[KazVee]

Some of the old wiki links won't work anymore because a few weeks ago we switched to a self-hosted MediaWiki site away from the old Gitbook that'd been in use for 5 years, and it handles underscores and dashes in URLs a little differently. All the same content can be found in the new wiki but if you bookmarked specific pages you may need to update your bookmarks.

I'm more familiar with just uploading files to create websites, too. I haven't used Publii personally but my understanding is that it's similar to WordPress in terms of it giving you a web interface (or in Publii's case, a local-machine-only interface) where you would type in your posts and customize the text in the built-in (used to be called WYSIWYG) editor, instead of using html code to format the raw text files being uploaded. Then, because it's all running locally, this is why the wiki page points out that you would need to upload every time you post. Since you're familiar with creating and uploading html files, it would be no surprise to you that the changes you made in your text editor on your computer won't show up on your website until you upload and overwrite the old file. But we point this out for the folks who have only used WordPress before, where pages they edit are already live on their deployed site as soon as they save their changes, since that extra upload step to get a Publii page deployed isn't something they'd have had to do with their WP site.

The server (and server load) that the wiki mentions refers to the shared hosting server (Johnny, Tommy, or Morty). When someone uses WordPress on the shared hosting, when they open their WP site to create and edit posts and format the text, etc., all the compute power that WP uses to make that happen is taking place on the shared server. When you also take into account that using lots of WP plugins increases the load, plus the risk of bot attacks, account suspensions can happen due to high load caused by their account on the shared resources. I suspect a lot of WP users aren't comfortable using a text editor to create and upload website files. The way Publii avoids account load issues is that it only runs on your local machine for any real-time editing. Then when you're done editing on your machine, there's probably a build process to generate a bunch of static files to upload via FTP. A static site will cause practically no account load on the shared hosting servers.

If you're comfortable using text editors to make websites and you only want static pages, you could definitely just upload html files into your httpdocs folder to create a site that way. The options mentioned on the Wiki WP Alternatives page are just other ways for folks who like using frameworks (or who maybe don't know how to build a website in html from scratch) as other lower risk ways to build a site that's less likely to get their accounts suspended. If you're familiar with Markdown, I've found that Astro is another nice option to quickly get a decent looking site up without too much fuss, if you only need a few pages. Apparently it'll also render html code nicely but I haven't experimented with that. I hope some of the above was helpful but please let me know if I explained anything badly. 😄

I'm not sure about how best to deploy a customized version of a software package offered inside Softaculous. Hopefully the author of the Easy!Appointments customizations gives you some tips on that, if they've encountered this type of thing before, but if not please let us know and we can try to dig a little more.

[dlane]

Thanks again! I didn't keep in mind that I am not the intended audience for that wiki article about Wordpress alternatives. It makes more sense from that perspective.

Publii sounds like what I'm looking for. Since SiteJet isn't a specifically installed app, I don't think I have to remove it, but I can just delete everything in httpdocs except the folder(s) my other apps are in? I think that'll do for testing, but once I'm done experimenting, I'll probably want to start from scratch.

The author of Easy!Appointments is helping me. I needed to run an update script, which is think is needed for any updates of that app. That resolved the initial errors but I think there are more related to the customization, not anything about the hosting. I'm happy I was able to upload and extract the zip file. Since I don't have ssh access, the way I'm used to accessing my home server, I was nervous I wasn't going to be able to test or host this custom version of the app on helio host, but having those built-in file manager features means I can.