This page describes a method for securing a standalone installation of CiviCRM for production servers. It does not guarantee perfect security, it just applies a general best practice of limiting the amount of potentially exploitable PHP code that you put under your web server's docroot.

1. First things first

If you haven't yet setup your standalone CiviCRM installation according to these instructions, start there first.

2. Secure your installation

Overview

The basic idea here is that we want only the civicrm/standalone directory in the docroot of your web server, and then we'll symlink to the other directories that we need outside that. That will remove a lot of PHP code from your docroot. That's a Good Thing.

Assumptions

This guide assumes that your CiviCRM standalone installation lives in /var/www/civicrm on Ubuntu / Debian and /var/www/html/civicrm on Red Hat / CentOS. Please adjust the example commands accordingly if yours lives elsewhere.

It also assumes you're working with a Linux, UNIX, or UNIX-like system (Mac OS X is a type of UNIX). These instructions won't work on Windows. Running a production server (meaning lots of people can access it remotely) on Windows is not recommended.

Tell me how to do it already!

1. Move your CiviCRM directory out of your docroot
   • Ubuntu 7.10 or 8.04 (and probably Debian too)
     • /var/www is the docroot, so we shouldn't keep the civicrm directory there. Let's move it to /var/local/civicrm (or somewhere else if you don't like that choice, just so long as it's not in your docroot path).

       sudo mv /var/www/civicrm /var/local/

   • Red Hat / CentOS 5
     • /var/www is not the docroot, /var/www/html is, so we can just move the civicrm dir from /var/www/html to /var/www

       sudo mv /var/www/html/civicrm /var/www/

2. Symlink the standalone directory back into the docroot
   • Ubuntu / Debian

     sudo ln -s /var/local/civicrm/standalone /var/www/civicrm

   • Red Hat / CentOS

     sudo ln -s /var/www/civicrm/standalone /var/www/html/civicrm

3. Create other needed symlinks in the standalone directory (these may already exist, so check first)
   • Ubuntu / Debian

     cd /var/local/civicrm/standalone

   • Red Hat / CentOS

     cd /var/www/civicrm/standalone

   • All distros

     ls (see if they exist already, if not proceed)
     sudo ln -s ../css
     sudo ln -s ../extern
     sudo ln -s ../i
     sudo ln -s ../js
     sudo ln -s ../packages

4. Update your civicrm.settings.php file (it will backup the existing one to civicrm.settings.php.old)
   • Ubuntu / Debian

     sudo perl -p -i.old -e 's#/var/www/civicrm#/var/local/civicrm#' civicrm.settings.php

   • Red Hat / CentOS

     sudo perl -p -i.old -e 's#/var/www/html/civicrm#/var/www/civicrm#' civicrm.settings.php

That's it!

You should now be able to access your CiviCRM installation by going to the same url but without the /standalone on the end.

Known issues

Hopefully at some point in the near future we can get rid of the need to link the packages directory into the docroot, as that exposes a lot of PHP code to the web.