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Having jumped through several hundred hoops I've finally managed to get Centos 5.8 to mount a VirtualBox shared folder (which is not read-only), which now appears at:

/media/sf_sites

This is a folder on my host machine (Mac OS X 10.8.2) containing sites.

The directory and its subfolders are all owned by user root and group vboxsf

I have added the user apache to the group vboxsf

However httpd doesn't let me use my shared folder as Document root. My vhost is set up as:

DocumentRoot /media/sf_sites/mysite/public

On Apache restart I get this:

Starting httpd: Warning: DocumentRoot [/media/sf_sites/mysite/public] does not exist
                                                           [  OK  ]

And, unsurprisingly, when viewing the site in my browser I get a 403 error. ("You don't have permission to access / on this server.")

Any ideas whether it's possible to make this work?

I want to develop on my Mac but use Linux in VirtualBox as my development server. Is there an alternative way to do this?

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1 Answer

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Create a mount point in your Linux, install sshfs if you don't have it yet.

Do the following in CentOS

sudo su - apache
sshfs root@< your OS X IP >:< web folder path > < mount point >

For example:

  • OS X IP: 192.168.0.10
  • OS X web folder path: /Users/me/webOSX
  • CentOS mount point: /var/www/webLinux

The sshfs command will be: sshfs root@192.168.0.10:/Users/me/webOSX /var/www/webLinux

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This mounts successfully, but same problem: DocumentRoot [/var/www/sites/mysite/public] does not exist – Ade Nov 4 '12 at 9:48
Update: got it to work with user_allow_other set in /etc/fuse.conf and sshfs -o allow_other me@192.168.1.103:/Users/me/Sites /var/www/sites. But Apache throwing "unexpected end of file" errors into error_log. – Ade Nov 4 '12 at 10:37
@Abe, did you sudo su - apache before doing the sshfs mount? – John Siu Nov 4 '12 at 16:56
Yes I did. It seemed to be basically working, but PHP is having problems with file lengths (unexpected end of file errors). Coming to the conclusion that back-end code is better off local on the server! – Ade Nov 5 '12 at 15:01

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