How to amend an Application Vault Repository in Plesk

I’m currently building a WordPress Hosting Service where customers get hosting with WordPress pre-installed.

I also want to offer several pre-installed Themes and Plugins that I’ll deploy from the Plesk Back End using Application Vault.

WordPress is already available as a free repository, however it does take some time for new versions to be made available – and of course my Themes and Plugins aren’t there either.

So how can I amend or build a new Plesk Application Vault repository? Let’s find out in this article, in which I’m describing all my findings 😉

Where does Plesk save repositories?

It does this in <plesk-install>/var/cgitory – so it depends on your distribution. The best way to find out is by issuing

whereis psa

and be told by your system. You’ll want to look in the second path it gives you. Then amend the above “/var/cgitory” to that.

On CentOS for example, the full path is

/usr/local/psa/var/cgitory

In here you’ll find sub-folders for each installed (and unpacked) repository – say “WordPress-3.0-3”. The naming convention describes the application, product version and release version of what’s contained in the repository.

In each folder you’ll find several other subfolders such as scripts, forms, apps etc. that are used during the installation of the repo onto your domains.

The htdocs folder contains files that are actually installed when you deploy the repository. Simply adding/removing/changing files in this folder will change the way your Application’s static content is installed.

If you’re updating this folder with the latest version of WordPress for example and add a couple of themes here, they’ll be immediately available on the domain upon deployment.

Sweet!

How to build a repository for use in Plesk?

That’s a bit more complex… I’ll tell you as soon as I find out 😉

In the meantime, read the official Parallels Application Vault Developers Guide.