Sharing images folder between 2 domains on Linux VPS with Plesk

[janine]

Say x.com and y.com are both hosted on the same Linux VPS.
x.com/images stores images to be used on both x.com and y.com.
Ideally I would like to to just have one physical copy of the images on x.com and access this from y.com i.e. map or alias y.com/images to x.com/images.

From googling around, I see that this is a common thing to want to do and hear mentions of having alias commands in vhost.conf files on Plesk.
However, I know little about Plesk and do not have a clue how to proceed.

Is it possible to set this up easily on a Blacknight VPS?

Otherwise, the only way I can see of achieving this is to reference the full x.com URL on y.com whenever I want to use an image from x.com.

As well as thinking that this type of linking must be inefficient, this would also cause me issues as I won't always be sure which images exist on x.com and I don't want to be trying to display images on y.com that don't exist on x.com. On x.com, I can use file_exists() in my PHP script to check the images exist first as they are local files, but I can't do that from y.com, so it all starts getting a bit messy.

Any help on this would be appreciated. If I could just get over this one hurdle, it would make getting the sites up and running for both domains very easy.

[blacknight]

Without thinking too much about this ...

Could you use a mod_rewrite rule? ie. map /images to the source?

[janine]

Thanks for the quick reply on this.

I had wondered if htaccess could handle this alright, but if I used rewrite rules, I think I'd still be stuck for checking the images exist on the remote server. Plus, I figured that using rewrite rules would still be the same load server wise as just linking to the remote URLs, but I'm no sys admin so I could well be wrong there!

If the "virtual" images directory isn't possible on a Blacknight VPS, I'm thinking I may be best keeping track of the active image URLs in the database and on y.com work out which images exist on x.com based on that. I know that another workaround would be to store the images themselves in the database, but I'd rather not get into that.

[blacknight]

Hmmm

I'm not sure which is the best way to do it, but I'll see if I can get one of our sysadmins to look at this thread and possibly suggest a solution

[janine]

That would be brilliant thanks - much appreciated.

Thanks for the quick replies on a Friday night

[paul]

how about the liunx command ln -s , for a symbolic link

How to: Linux / UNIX create soft link with ln command

[janine]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your help. That sounds like it might do the trick. I will try setting that up and report back.

[janine]

I've got my symlink set up, but am getting 403 errors when I try to access URLs under the symlink. After chatting online with support, I've sent in a ticket for further investigation. Fingers crossed it can be sorted!
Thanks again,
Janine.

[janine]

Googled and found a fix for my 403 permissions error: adding the following line to the htaccess file on the domain with the symlink:
Options +FollowSymLinks

It's great to have this working, but I'm just wondering if there's any downside to turning this on in htaccess?

Thanks,
Janine.