putting owncloud 8 on a subdomain instead of a subdirectory on centos 7

After moving to a new server, I wanted to finally get ownCloud up and running (over SSL, of course) on it.

And I like subdomains for different services, so I wanted to put it at sub.domain.tld. This turns out to be not as straight-forward as one might otherwise hope, sadly – ownCloud expects to be installed to domain.tld/owncloud (and plops itself into /var/www/owncloud by default (or sometimes /var/www/html/owncloud).

My server is running CentOS 7, Apache 2.4, and MariaDB (a drop-in replacement for MySQL). This overview is going to presume you’re running the same configuration – feel free to spin one up quickly at Digital Ocean to try this yourself.

Start with the ownCloud installation instructions, which will point you to the openSUSE build service page, where you’ll follow the steps to add the ownCloud community repo to your yum repo list, and install ownCloud. (In my last how-to, 8.0 was current – 8.2 rolled-out since I installed 8.1 a couple days ago.)

Here is where you need to go “off the reservation” to get it ready to actually install.

Add a VirtualHost directive to redirect http://sub.domain.tld to https://sub.domain.tld (cipher suite list compiled thusly):

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName sub.domain.tld Redirect permanent / https://sub.domain.tld/ </VirtualHost>

Configure an SSL VirtualHost directive to listen for sub.domain.tld:

<VirtualHost *:443> SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/sub.domain.tld/cert.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/sub.domain.tld/privkey.pem SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/sub.domain.tld/fullchain.pem DocumentRoot /var/www/subdomain ServerName sub.domain.tld ErrorLog logs/subdomain-error_log CustomLog logs/subdomain-access_log "%t %h %{SSL_PROTOCOL}x %{SSL_CIPHER}x \"%r\" %b" ServerAdmin user@domain.tld SSLEngine on SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 SSLHonorCipherOrder on SSLOptions +StdEnvVars <Directory "/var/www/cgi-bin"> SSLOptions +StdEnvVars SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 # allow .htaccess to change things <Directory "/var/www/subdomain"> Options All +Indexes +FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost>