[MapServer-users] Is there a way to set the document root for .map files?

[Richard Greenwood]

This doesn't exactly answer your question, but directly referencing your
map file in the URL is discouraged because it's a potential security issue.
The "best practice" is to create an alias to each of your map files. For
mapserv >= 8.0 that can be done in the mapserver.conf file, for example:
   MAP
      foo1 "/path/to/foo1.map
      foo2 "/path/to/foo2.map
   END
or for mapserv < 8.0 it can be done in the Apache config:
   SetEnv foo1 "/path/to/foo1.map"
   SetEnv foo1 "/path/to/foo1.map"
And then "best practice" is to block access to map files on the file system
with
   MS_MAP_NO_PATH "1"
which is done in the mapserver.conf or the Apache conf depending on mapserv
version.

If you still want to reference map files in the http request I believe they
are relative to the mapserv binary (I'm saying this from memory, so I might
be wrong). So you could put a symlink in your cgi-bin/ to
/path/to/mapfiles/ but I think that's a terrible idea.

Rich




On Thu, Mar 20, 2025 at 9:37 AM Rob Dennett via MapServer-users <
mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> Is there a way to set a sort of document root for .map files and other
> files .map files might reference?  For example, my .map files are found at
> the root of an S3 bucket and we're trying to use an EFS volume instead.
> Our URLs currently look like
>
> https://www.ourOrg.com/cgi-bin/mapserv/?map=/foo.map&...
>
> Where foo.map lives in the root of the s3 bucket.  With the new system we
> want, it will live at the root of the EFS volume, but with that volume
> mounted in a different directory in the docker container where MapServer
> runs, e.g. /ourOrg_mapserver.  The file system in the container is
>
> /ourOrg_mapserver/foo.map
>
> There are many existing URLs in our client apps as well as 3rd party
> customer apps which use the above URL.  Is there a way to set up mapserver
> so that /ourOrg_mapserver acts like an Apache document root so that
> existing stuff won't need to change?
>
> Thanks,
> Rob
> _______________________________________________
> MapServer-users mailing list
> MapServer-users at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users
>


-- 
Richard W. Greenwood
www.greenwoodmap.com
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