Private file handling in a Plesk Environment

Ever faced the issue of having an other environment then your own? If not, get yourself the experience. You can learn from it! :)

But what a hell is it sometimes, tried setting up a drupal 6 project on a hosting account with plesk administration. Luckely with shell access..

First encounter with the plesk-aliens? I want private uploads (with funded reasons) so to give you a heads up on the structure created by the plesk panel.
The http directory (our webfolder)
/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/httpdocs
The private file directory
/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/private_files
The TMP directory (maybe obvious..)
/tmp

After confirming this in filesystem settings we get the following error :

The directory /var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/private_files does not exist.

So we double check, triple, quatriple check. C'mon apache. It does exist! So let's investigate..

Possible solutions :

1) directory permissions (chmod)
2) directory owner (chown)
3) drupal issues? Doubt it...
4) php configuration
5) Apache configuration

Since all of these were quite hard to manage in plesk system I dove in to the dark bash...
Look what I found!

/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/conf

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
             php_admin_flag engine on
             php_admin_flag safe_mode on
             php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/httpdocs:/tmp"
     </IfModule>
     <IfModule mod_php5.c>
             php_admin_flag engine on
             php_admin_flag safe_mode on
             php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/httpdocs:/tmp"
</IfModule>

So just add your folder to the open_basedir directory and it can be found by the webapplication (in our case drupal)

example :

php_admin_value open_basedir 
      "/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/httpdocs:/tmp:/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/private_files"

Hmm, after some testing it was still not exactly how we wanted it. Next error? Bring it on!

mkdir() [<a href='function.mkdir'>function.mkdir</a>]: SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. 
  The script whose uid is 0 is not allowed to access /var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/private_files/59 
  owned by uid 33 in ...

Since our access permissions are optimal in the server itself and safe_mode is quite obsolete (it will even disappear in PHP6) you can just turn it off.

Update 1 (thanks to sun):
Found an easier way !
Add a vhost.conf file with following data in
/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/conf :

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/httpdocs/>
         php_admin_flag safe_mode off
         php_admin_value open_basedir 
            "/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/httpdocs:/tmp:/var/www/vhosts/drupal6project/private_files:
</Directory>

Execute /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a to reconfigure plesk.
restart apache and check your website working with plesk and private files

Happy plesking in drupal!