Automating the virtual hosts maintenance in a multisite environment

Abstract

There are many companies, that offer platforms, hosting multiple sites and applications, offering identical or similar services and functionalities, but are different in design and have different domain names and configurations. At some point adding new sites and maintaining the existing ones becomes time-consuming, as their number grows. This process can be automated by creating a generation script, which reads JSON configuration files, containing the different information for each host like server name, ssl certificates, environment variables, etc., and generates the corresponding virtual host configuration files, based on a predefined template. The script can read different information from the JSON files and use different templates, based on the environment - development, integration, production. Using this automation script makes the updates for hundreds of virtual hosts an easy process, taking only seconds. The effectiveness of the application is shown by the conducted experiment with 150 different hosts, each taking approximately 2 minutes to manually edit and activate. Using the script, this time is decreased 150 times (the number of hosts), as it takes only 2 minutes to edit the template and run the script. It is obvious that the effectiveness grows with the number of hosts. The paper could be also used as a basic template or pattern for any other implementation of the JSON API in any web-based application.