Why is there private_html in my [cms.root] directory variable and is it trouble?

Question

The Settings - Upload Directories screen (url civicrm/admin/setting/path?reset=1) makes it possible to examine the value of the [cms.root] variable. Just click the first help question mark.

In my case the cms.root path contains the directory private_html. That is a bit strange because I installed CiviCRM in the public_html directory and also added this path to the $civicrm_root variable.

Why is this, and does it harm?

More details: The CiviCRM version is 4.7.27 on Drupal. It runs on a VPS administered with DirectAdmin, and https is enabled.

Answer 1

It starts with a peculiarity of DirectAdmin. Using a subdomain, you have to upload the files for https connection to private_html and the files for not secure http connection to public_html. For the situation these files are the same DirectAdmin offers the option to create a symbolic link from private_html to public_html. Thus when you ask for https://<domain>/file.html it looks for the file /private_html/file.html and thanks to the link this is the same as public_html/file.html.

The [cms.root] variabele is not set. It is derived from the DRUPAL_ROOT constant, that is calculated with getcwd(). At the moment you use a secure connection this functions returns the private_html directory.

And it causes trouble.

The directory variable [cms.root] is used to calculate the URL variabele [civicrm.root] so this is also wrong. The effect is that a lot of javascript files are not found, for example ckeditor.js.

My solution is adding the [cms.root] directly to the civicrm.settings.php file with the following line:

$civicrm_paths['cms.root']['path'] = '/home/<user>/domains/<subdomain>/public_html/crm';