How do I access the space on an attached volume from my webroot?

August 30, 2016 8.7k views
LEMP Block Storage Debian
berricks
By:
berricks

I have some large image directories for a webcam site. The directories are in this path /var/www/boulderflatironcam.com/public_html/ on the server. The web root was laid out on the droplet's 40GB disk and I was expecting the block storage to just extend this disk. I started rsyncing files from another server and filled up the main disk. It looks like it comes up as an attached storage device. Do I need to move the whole web directory to the new storage or is there a way to put just certain directories on the block storage? Or, is there a way to just have the block storage extend the basic server disk?

1 comment
  • berricks August 30, 2016

    I'm running nginx on the droplet. I was able to create the directories on the storage volume so now it seems like I just need a way for the website to access these directories. Probably similar to the apache answer below?

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2 Answers
asb MOD August 30, 2016
Accepted Answer

It's is also possible to do this using Nginx's simularly named alias directive. Again, let's say your storage volume is mounted at /mnt/volume-nyc1-01 and that you want http://example.com/images to be served from the volume. First, you would need to create a directory on the volume that you can give ownership to the www-data user. E.g:

  • mkdir /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images

  • sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images

Then you'll need to edit your Nginx's configuration. By default, that is found at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default. Now add an alias directive pointing /images to /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images:

        location /images/ {
                alias /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images/;
        }

Finally, restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

  • sudo service nginx restart
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asb MOD August 30, 2016

You can use Apache's Alias directive to point a path to a specific directory outside of your web root. For example, let's say your storage volume is mounted at /mnt/volume-nyc1-01 and that you want http://example.com/images to be served from the volume. First, you would need to create a directory on the volume that you can give ownership to the www-data user. E.g:

  • mkdir /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images

  • sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images

Then you'll need to edit your Apache configuration. By default, that is found at /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf. Now add an Alias directive pointing /images to /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images:

        Alias /images /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images
        <Directory /mnt/volume-nyc1-01/images>
                Require all granted
        </Directory>

Finally, restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

  • sudo service apache2 restart

You can find out more details about how Block Storage volumes work in this tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-block-storage-on-digitalocean

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  • berricks August 30, 2016

    This is excellent but I'm using nginx. Would it have similar steps?

  • FriendlyUI December 21, 2016

    I followed the above steps for apache configuration and it didn't work. Does anyone know if there other steps that I might be missing? It just keeps saying page or file not found, 404 error. I've tried changing permissions for the folder and nothing. thought anyone? :/

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