MacOS – Enable home directory sites in Lion server

macososx-serverwebserver

I had a Leopard server with a few hundred users (students), and each of them was able to maintain their own web content in their Sites folders in their home directories — and they could access them (from either inside or outside the network) by going to http://ourdomain.com/~studentname.

Just migrated to a Lion server, and everything is working perfectly, except now visiting any of those home directory sites nets us a 404. I can't find anything in the GUI apps that looks like it could help with this… am I missing something?

I've already tried re-creating the whole OD structure, but that hasn't helped.

Best Answer

Found it: The UserDir module in Apache2 defaults to public_html. So ~studentname was being directed to /Users/studentname/public_html. Which doesn't exist in any of the users' folders.

What does exist is /Users/studentname/Sites, so I just added this line to the httpd.conf:

UserDir Sites

...and it's working perfectly now. Awesome!

Many thanks to @bmike for pointing me in the right direction.