Using a PEAR-installed web application on multiple vhosts

Hi all, The following problem has been discussed in IRC without avail, so I'm bringing it here for enlightenment of us: Last weekend I packaged up SemanticScuttle, a web-based bookmark manager, into a pear package - Files separated in www, test, php, data and doc files. It needs to be configured before it can be used, i.e. database connection details and administrator users need to be set. Now I imagine the workflow of setting up an instance of the bookmark manager for a user vhost on that machine as follows: 1. User asks admin: "Hey, I want to use SemanticScuttle. There is a pear package, please install it." 2. Admin discovers channel and installs PEAR package system wide. This allows central updates by the administrator just like the "normal" package system does. 3. User writes a config file into his vhost directory. 4. ???? Up to now I thought that just symlinking the user's vhost directory /home/username/www/bookmarks.example.org/ can be symlinked to $pear_www_dir/application/, making all www-relevant files available in the vhost. Unfortunately, this does not allow the user to configure the application by creating a config file in the vhost directory. Configuration is the central problem here: How does the user configure the application in each vhost? Several ideas: 0. vhost directory is symlinked to www_dir/app, config file is stored in PEAR's cfg directory. Downside: - User cannot change settings (blocker!) - Multiple instances have the same config. 1. as in 0, but config file name depends on $hostname Downside: - User cannot change settings (blocker!) 2. The user vhost directory is a symlink to the www_dir/$app folder. The application www files load the config from "../config.php". This would load the config file from /home/username/www/bookmarks.example.org/../config.php, thus /home/username/www/config.php - making symlinking the www files possible. Downside is that multiple instances of the same application for the same user is not possible since all use the config.php file in ~/www/ Also, some httpds do not tell you the original path but the realpath, giving you $www_dir/app instead of /home/username/... 3. Combination of 2 and 1: config file is loaded from ../, with a file name that contains the hostname or IP 4. vhost dir is a normal directory, config.php resides within. All files from www_dir/app are symlinked into that vhost directory. Plus: - Config file is where it is needed, no problem locating it - No need to care about $hostname and $ip or server aliases for config file name. Minus: - Updating the application might bring new files and remove old files in www_dir/app. Those would need to be symlinked manually by the user. 5. Make use of pear's two-tier config file hierarchy: user and system config. With pyrus, one could use a custom user cfg dir for each user or each vhost. Downside is that for every http request, the cfg dir needs to be determined from the pearrc files, adding massive overhead. All methods listed here are not really comfortable. Other ideas? -- Regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen Christian Weiske -=≡ Geeking around in the name of science since 1982 ≡=-