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VHFFS (Virtual Hosting For Free Software) Is a tool suite made to manage a massive shared hosting platform. VHFFS allows you to provide to your users a nice user-friendly interface to manage the services they have on your system and to your administrator an easy way to automatically run administrative and repetitive tasks. VHFFS is designed to control and configure the main hosting softwares such as Apache, Exim, Subversion and many others.

Some alternatives

  • VHCS
  • AlternC
  • SysCP

Description of VHFFS

First, because VHFFS is designed to manage an open platform, it allows users to make services requests that will be moderated by the crew. Thanks to it original design, VHFFS is able to work natively on one or several servers. This allows the administrators to dispatch the services depending on their needs and computing power. Then, VHFFS have it owns way to manage users : they are dispatched in groups/projects and can work together on their services. The project leader can write ACLs to grant access to the other members of his group on every service he owns. Then, VHFFS provides a perfect isolated workspace to all members directly on the file-system. Users are separated and locked in their group directory using a fuse based virtual file system. Thanks to VHFFS-FS, TuxFamily is now able to provide SSH to their users. VHFFS is also the only software of this kind that have three user interfaces : a web panel, a command line interface and an IRC bot.

VHFFS is for everyone who wants to build his own massive shared hosting system on one or several servers. You should know POSIX systems before thinking installing VHFFS.

Perl devs, web designers (XHTML + CSS, javascript, AJAX)

VHFFS is strongly linked to the french organisation TuxFamily.org which is the main user and contributor.

VHFFS is composed of three main parts : The API, the panel and the robots.

The API, the main part of VHFFS provides an access interface to the database and manage access rights. It contains most of the VHFFS source code and control the objects (users, groups, services...)

The panel allows the users and the crew to do run all the tasks on the platform. Users can create groups and request new services, add people to their team, configure their services... Administrators use it to moderate user requests, modify objects, tune services, give more quota to good projects or simply to get detailed statistics about their system.

Robots are run periodically thanks to crontab. They call the API on the services that have been changed on the panel, writing the changes in the right configuration files and calling the right external software. They transform users requests into reality on the servers.


VHFFS can manage a platform providing the following services :

  1. Website hosting (PHP4 and PHP5 are supported) detailed statistics and logs available.
  2. MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
  3. Subversion repositories
  4. CVS repositories
  5. Mail boxes with pop/imap/webmails
  6. Domain management(DNS)
  7. Mailboxes and forwards for domains (with pop/imap/webmail)
  8. Mailing lists (for your domain or not)
  9. Download repositories with statistics and logs.
  10. Disc quota for all projects.
  11. Jabber

Hosted people can access their files through FTP, FTPS and SSH.


References TuxFamily

wikipedia pages