How do I find out where the web site's code resides?

Solution 1:

First of all you should check what websites are hosted on the server

# apachectl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS

Then when you will find a site check corresponding configuration file for the option DocumentRoot. For example

# apachectl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS
VirtualHost configuration:
wildcard NameVirtualHosts and _default_ servers:
*:80                   is a NameVirtualHost
         default server 192.168.88.87 (/etc/httpd/conf.d/192.168.88.87.conf:1)
         port 80 namevhost 192.168.88.87 (/etc/httpd/conf.d/192.168.88.87.conf:1)
         port 80 namevhost gl-hooks.example.net (/etc/httpd/conf.d/hooks.conf:1)
                 alias example.net
                 alias www.example.net

You want to know where is resides a website example.net

# grep DocumentRoot /etc/httpd/conf.d/hooks.conf
    DocumentRoot /vhosts/gl-hooks.example.net/

# cd /vhosts/gl-hooks.example.net/
# ls -la
total 4484
drwxr-xr-x  6 apache apache    4096 Feb 10 11:59 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root   root      4096 Feb 23 08:54 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root   root      1078 Dec 19 09:31 favicon.ico
-rw-r--r--  1 apache apache     195 Dec 25 14:51 .htaccess
-rw-r--r--  1 apache apache      98 Dec  7 10:52 index.html

Should also be on the lookout for aliases and redirects/rewrites

You also should paid attention on any alias directives. For example with the following settings

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName example.net
   ServerAlias www.example.net
   ...
   DocumentRoot /vhosts/default/public_html/
   Alias /api/ /vhosts/default/public_api/
   ...
</VirtualHost>

When you will access http://example.net/some.file.html - apache will look the file at /vhosts/default/public_html/, at the same time with http://example.net/api/some.file.html the file will be looked at /vhosts/default/public_api/.

What about rewrites/redirects, especially programmatic (when redirects are triggered by some php code), I think there is no easy way to find such cases.

Solution 2:

Try using find

find / -type f \( -iname "*index.html*" -o -iname "*index.php*" \) 2> /dev/null

Otherwise assuming Apache has been installed from Ubuntu repositories, look in /etc/apache2/sites-available, i.e.

grep -niR "thedomainname" /etc/apache2/sites-available

If the website has an apache VHOST defined, that might locate the config file, then look in that file for "documentroot" this should tell you the location of the source code

---

Solution 3:

Another method, which can be useful for debugging a website (or any process for that matter) is to use lsof (which may not be on path, commonly found in /sbin/lsof)

lsof -s [PID] will list all the files the given process has a handle on, and can be useful to see exactly what is being used (this includes your html/php files, as well as log files and libraries the site needs)