Introduction:

Whenever PHP runs as an Apache Module it get executes as “user/group” of the web server which is usually “nobody” or “apache”. SuExec is a mechanism supplied with Apache which allows executing CGI scripts as the user to which they belongs to, rather than Apache’s user. This improves security in possibilities where multiple mutually distrusting users can put CGI content on the server and these scripts are executed as the user that created them. If user “admin” uploaded a PHP OR CGI script, you would see it was “admin” running the script when looking at the running processes on your server? This also provides an additional layer of security where script permissions can’t be set to 777 (read/write/execute at user/group/world level).

Installation:

**Make sure yum is installed on the server as it will help to install the dependencies.

1) To get the latest version of mod_suphp RPM enable the Atomic Repository for Yum. This can be done using Following command

# wget -q -O - http://eitwebguru.com/scripts/atomic |sh 

2) After this mod_suPHP can be installed using command “yum install mod_php”

Configuration:

Once mod_suphp is installed, you will have to configure it with Apache.

1) First you will have to create a suphp.conf file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ Directory and Paste the following code

LoadModule suphp_module modules/mod_suphp.so

php_admin_value engine off
suPHP_Engine On
AddHandler x-httpd-php .php .php3 .php4 .php5
suPHP_AddHandler x-httpd-php

2) Restart Apache Service using command “service httpd restart”

3) Now you will have to creae suphp configuration file. So, create a new file in /etc directory named “suphp.conf” (rename the existing file and create a new one) and add following lines in it:

[global]
logfile=/var/log/suphp.log
loglevel=info
webserver_user=apache
docroot=/var/www/vhosts
allow_file_group_writeable=false
allow_file_others_writeable=false
allow_directory_group_writeable=false
allow_directory_others_writeable=false
check_vhost_docroot=false
errors_to_browser=false
env_path=/bin:/usr/bin
umask=0022
min_uid=30
min_gid=30

[handlers]
x-httpd-php=php:/usr/bin/php-cgi
x-suphp-cgi=execute:!self

4) Restart Apache once more i.e. “service httpd restart”