How to Use Habari to Run Multiple Sites

One of the reasons I started looking at Habari was it's promise to be able to host multiple sites on one installation of the software. If you have multiple sites, that can save a fair amount of space on your server, and it makes upgrading much easier. Install the updated software once, and all your sites are automatically updated.

According to Habari's manual:

In order to run multiple sites, you will first need to create a sites directory inside your user directory. Then, inside user/sites you will create a directory for each site you want to run. Inside each of these sub-directories you will place a config.php with that site's configuration directives.

...
Additional Habari-powered sites do not need to use the same domain. Provided the web server is properly configured, a single installation of the Habari source code can serve www.habariproject.org, www.habarithemes.org, and www.habari-ya-kazi.com. Likewise, sub-domains and sub-directories are also supported.

Each Habari site can use its own themes and plugins, as well as the themes and plugins available to the "main" site. Simply create /themes and /plugins sub-directories inside each site's directory. A theme or plugin located in a site's directory structure is only available to that site; while themes and plugins in the top-level /user directory will be available to all sites.

I found two problems with this, though.

First, sub-directories don't work properly yet. So if your main site is www.example.com, www.example.com/subdir won't work properly.

Second, it took a while to figure out what properly configured means. In the end, it turned out to be simple.

Let's say your site's url is www.example.com. The top level directory structure for a Habari installation will look like this:

• www.example.com
  • 3rdparty
  • doc
  • system
  • user

To enable multiple sites, create a sites directory within the user directory. Within the sites directory create a directory for each site you wish to have. The only limitation is that the site's directory needs to have the same name as the url of the site. For example, if you want to run another two sites called www.sitetwo.com and test.example.com, the user directory structure will look like this:

• user
  • sites
    • www.sitetwo.com
    • test.example.com

In each of the sub-directories, place a config file with that site's configuration directives. You can use any combination of MySQL or SQLite databases, any themes, any plugins. All the sites are independent. Each site can even have it's own private themes and plugins that aren't available to the other sites on the installation by creating a themes and a plugins sub-directory for the site like this:

• www.sitetwo.com
  • themes
  • plugins

and placing your themes and plugins there. When it is looking for the proper themes and plugins, Habari looks first in the site's private directories, then in the installation's user directory, then in the installation's system directory.

After you have your directories set up, you need to tell the webserver how to find the sites - the properly configured part the manual talks about. This turns out to be simple. Point the web server to the same directory the main site is in. In other words, with the examples I've used here: If your main site is www.example.com and it is at /home/www, tell the web server that www.sitetwo.com, and test.example.com are also at /home/www. Habari will find the sub-directory with the same name as the url, and use the config file in that directory to pull up the site.

It Just Works.