Apache – Best Way to Handle Thousands of Permanent Redirects

Attempting to expand on @Zoredache's answer, as I give this a go myself:

• Create a new group (www-pub) and add the users to that group

  groupadd www-pub

  usermod -a -G www-pub usera ## must use -a to append to existing groups

  usermod -a -G www-pub userb

  groups usera ## display groups for user

• Change the ownership of everything under /var/www to root:www-pub

  chown -R root:www-pub /var/www ## -R for recursive

• Change the permissions of all the folders to 2775

  chmod 2775 /var/www ## 2=set group id, 7=rwx for owner (root), 7=rwx for group (www-pub), 5=rx for world (including apache www-data user)

  Set group ID (SETGID) bit (2) causes the group (www-pub) to be copied to all new files/folders created in that folder. Other options are SETUID (4) to copy the user id, and STICKY (1) which I think lets only the owner delete files.

  There's a -R recursive option, but that won't discriminate between files and folders, so you have to use find, like so:

  find /var/www -type d -exec chmod 2775 {} +

• Change all the files to 0664

  find /var/www -type f -exec chmod 0664 {} +

• Change the umask for your users to 0002

  The umask controls the default file creation permissions, 0002 means files will have 664 and directories 775. Setting this (by editing the umask line at the bottom of /etc/profile in my case) means files created by one user will be writable by other users in the www-group without needing to chmod them.

Test all this by creating a file and directory and verifying the owner, group and permissions with ls -l.

Note: You'll need to logout/in for changes to your groups to take effect!

I don't know what exactly defines a "maintenance nightmare" in your book, but you could try to go with a dynamic rewriting map in apache:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap    vanity-map       prg:/path/to/vanity.pl
RewriteRule   ^/(.*)/(.*)$  /${vanity-map:$1}/$2

vanity.pl could could be a simple perl script (don't forget to set $| = 1;) which gets the first part of the request URL (as outlined above) on STDIN and is supposed to rewrite that - e.g. by querying a database.

Now, that just leaves the frontend. I'm an inexperienced Ruby on Rails programmer (it's just a spare time activity), but I think, if it doesn't need to look pretty, even I could write an application that authenticates a user, lets him create a rewriting and shows that up for approval to some IT guys/$WHATEVER in much less than a week, so I don't think any real programmer would have a problem doing that in a few hours. Depending on the database, there might even be frontends readily available which will do the job with only a little customization (php*admin comes to my mind).

This way, you get all the flexibility of a database approach paired with a central source for all redirections. As long as the database's index on the URL part fits in your servers memory, you won't even have to worry about performance.