CakePHP on Media Temple (dv) 3.5: CakePHP, PHP, Linux, Media Temple

A good thing to do when deploying CakePHP websites is to load one copy of the CakePHP core files onto your server, and point all of your domains to that core directory. 

Media Temple's Plesk default configuration does not let PHP access files outside the website httpdocs. So we need to configure the domain's settings to have access to the root /cake folder, or wherever you happened to put the CakePHP root files.

First, let's make a new config file in our domain. Make sure you replace domain.com with your domain.

Bash:

cd /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/conf/
vi vhost.conf

Then basically we are over riding the default settings of Plesk with our own. Setting open_basedir to allow the /cake path.

Apache:

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/subdomains/tools/httpdocs>
        <IfModule sapi_apache2.c>
                php_admin_flag engine on
                php_admin_flag safe_mode off
                php_admin_value open_basedir "/cake:/var/www/vhosts/domain.com/subdomains/tools/httpdocs:/tmp"
        </IfModule>
        <IfModule mod_php5.c>
                php_admin_flag engine on
                php_admin_flag safe_mode off
                php_admin_value open_basedir "/cake:/var/www/vhosts/domain.com/subdomains/tools/httpdocs:/tmp"
        </IfModule>
</Directory>

Now we need to reload the vhost to include that loads our new config file.

Bash:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --reconfigure-vhost --vhost-name=domain.com
service httpd graceful

Great! Now we can have a central set of cake files and use it for each domain.