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Centralized Code for Hosted Solution

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 4:02 pm
by jwalsh
Hi,

We've built a substantial code engine for our upcoming hosted solution. What we would like to do is centralize this code base in one place, and access it from there from each customer account.

Since the engine itself is large, and will grow increasingly large, it doesn't make sense to have it installed on each account, as any upgrades will exponentially grow our storage overhead.

How is the best way to centralize this codebase? Everything will be accessed from our owned servers under our control, and our customers will not have FTP access. So there's not an issue of remotely including it from a location out of our control.

We've thought about giving every account root access and pointing at the codebase in the root folder of the servers, but that seems like a HUGE security risk to take, especially with sensitive data. We've thought about SOAP calls to a SOAP server as well, but that seems like overkill.

There's only one file that needs to be included, and that file takes care of loading the rest of the engine, and including the other files necessary.

Thanks,

Josh

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 4:08 pm
by Ollie Saunders
Couldn't you just store it on a central file server mounted at a specific point on all the customer accounts?

Re: Centralized Code for Hosted Solution

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 5:20 pm
by nickvd
jwalsh wrote:We've thought about giving every account root access and pointing at the codebase in the root folder of the servers, but that seems like a HUGE security risk to take, especially with sensitive data.

NO NO NO!

/me slaps your hands just for thinking of this ;)


Ole has the right idea... just use an nfs mount (assuming customers and code are on different machines) or just store the code within php's include path and you wont have anything to worry about... (perhaps chown/chmodding the code to enhance the security would be something to remember)

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 5:30 pm
by Ollie Saunders
We've thought about giving every account root access
I had a VPS with root access. But its completely private. You get root access to your own copy of Linux with a time slice, pretty cool.

VPS = Virtual Private Server

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:16 pm
by jwalsh
Thanks guys. Much appreciated. I'll look into it and post back.