Using a Script to Edit a conf File

Well, because I have been uber busy here at work, I haven't been able to write any blog posts. But, since I've been super productive at work, I get to write up a few posts about some more tools I've written to add to my arsenal. w00t!

So my latest task involved editing some of our web server's Apache confs. It consisted of adding a new alias so that we can call in some new app someone else wrote. Okay cool. Alias? Sure not a problem. Er...wait! The alias requires the site's directory name as part of the path! Oh no! That means I can't create one global alias!

Ah, see that's when I thought of writing this script that will look for a specific line in the vhost entries and will enter the new line after it. Pretty nifty eh? :)

So basically, what we have here is a list of all sites in a text file. Now we can use the site's directory name read in as a variable. It will then use awk to search for a specific line, and then print the new line you need right below it!

So if you take a look at the code, I want to add this line:
"Alias /newalias /mnt/www/$site" (where $site is the site directory name variable)
right after each line that fits the regex that searches for any line that has "Alias" and "reports" in one line followed by the site dir name at the end of the line. Obviously if you want to utilize this script you should edit the regex to your needs.

And that's it! Now think of all of the time saved rather than adding a new line manually to EACH vhost entry on EACH server! whoa....scary...


#!/bin/bash

exec < sites.txt
while read site ; do
echo "processing $site..."
awk '{print $0} '"/Alias.+reports.+\/$site"$/'{print " Alias /newalias /mnt/www/'"$site"'"}' httpd.conf > newhttpd.conf && mv newhttpd.conf httpd.conf
echo "done!"
done