Plesk auto update removed my application

[DilanR]

Hi, I went through loads of pain to install Koha.org 3.8 on my Debian 6+ server running Plesk 11.09. Two days a go an auto update by Plesk wiped out all configuration files for my Koha and the whole webserver stopped working. Non of the website resolved and it took me log to fix it and reinstall Koha. How can we avoid this?

I really like Plesk but in sounds that programmer community all advised me to remove Plesk since it create complication for the server. I just want to make sure that this will not happen again so I need a solution here.

 

[Sergey L]

What are the configuration files removed? Plesk wouldn't remove any configuration file, but it often would reset autogenerated configs - to ensure changes aren't lost, there are special configs for custom includes.

 

[DilanR]

all Koha-Apache

all koha-Apache config were removed so I had to reinstall Koha to regenerate the file again, then web server stopped working. When I tried to start that in Plesk I got

Error: Unable to make action: Unable to manage service by apache_control_adapter: Service /etc/init.d/apache2 failed to start

System error 2: No such file or directory
Service /etc/init.d/apache2 failed to start

System error 2: No such file or directory ('--start', 'web')

Then my server support said
(we regret to say that we can't help you here because we do not provide software
support for our dedicated servers. we can not give support for Plesk. You might some informations via
http://forum.parallels.com or http://kb.parallels.com .)

 

[DilanR]

This is continue to create problem when Plesk is auto updating. This time Koha and its system file are intact but new application which was installed by paid work is all gone, This happened for application http://projectfedena.org/ when Plesk update

11.0.9 Update #22 [29-Oct-2012]
Parallels Plesk Panel 11.0.9 Update #22

Why would update wipe out the settings? Now we have to pay to install this on our system again

The application was installed and Apache 2 was modified to enable the application to appear at

http://ums.koyauniversity.org/

we use that for couple days and then it was gone!

 

[Faris Raouf]

I suspect that the problem is that the changes that are being made for you to make your application work are being made in the wrong place. From the sounds of things they are being made to configuration files that are regularly changed or updated by Plesk, and that's not really the best place for them as you've found out.

To get around this issue you need these changes that are being made for you to be added as a file that will be included into the configuration as opposed to changing the existing global configuration. There are specific mechanisms for doing this in Plesk - for example the use of the vhost.conf file to add or modify configuration options for a specific domain.

I use Centos myself, but I'm sure other Linux flavours have something similar: If I want to add a global configuration addition, for example to load a module like mod_deflate and the necessary configuration for it, I add it /etc/httpd/conf.d/my-custom-conf-file.conf

If for some reason the use of an include file just isn't enough for your particular application then all that's really necessary is to keep a copy of the custom configuration file ready to compare with the updated configuration file written by Plesk and merge the differences.

Having said that, on Centos I've not seen the global apache configuration file (which for me is /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) being changed by Plesk and I do make certain changes to that file. I don't absolutely reply on it never being changed though.

Of course alternatively you might have found a strange bug - if you could let us know which file is being changed then it would help a lot