I have been tasked with setting up multiple LimeSurvey instances on the same server (for different business areas) which will be accessed via subd1.mydomain.co.uk, subd2.mydomain,.co.uk etc etc.

I am fine with setting up apache vhosts to do this, creating multiple databases, and wildcard certificates. I will be scripting the creation of config files for each instance.

My question is: which parts of the application directory tree is common and unchanged across an installation, and which is variable (e.g. config folder and files) , so that I am not duplicating code under the vhosts, and can replace with softlinks to common directories ?

I hope this is the right area to be asking this.

Regards
David

I am not an expert on setting this up, but to be honest, I would not mix different installations this way. Keep them separate. The code base of Limesurvey is big, but it is not that big that it would be huge burden, I think.

The soft links are probably a lot of work. And this might also cause trouble when updating/upgrading. Keep this in mind. The more complicated updates are, the higher the chances the updates won't be done. I would recommend to install completely separate instances and not interlink them at all. For update you might want to consider using comfort update, which in my opinion is a great addition to Limesurvey. Yes, it costs a few bucks, but in my opinion it is totally worth it because it reduces your time spent on updates considerably. It has made keeping your Limesurvey installation up to date so much easier (Disclaimer: I am not getting anything for this, I am not affiliated with the Limesurvey GmbH, just a convinced user).

Thanks for your quick response. I accept your warning re. separate instances and code differences - I would probably have softlinks to a "master install" which I would update from LimeSurvey codebase. I suspect the differences between 2 installations would most likely be a very small handful of files, and it seems a bit greedy of disk space (on a cloud VM) to burn up 320M per install. Especially when I have been warned that the number of instances could creep beyond 100.
It's all blue-sky at the moment, so if it does turn out to bite me on the back-side I can always just use your "duplicate it all" option.

Anyway, I am very grateful for your input and opinion.

David

I'm not OK with holch

About config : i'm more for one file (and do the test in this file to choose the good DB), but you need to create the empty DB before.

Else, what that must be different:
application/config/config.php
tmp/
upload/

You can set tmp and upload directory with uploaddir and tempdir.

I never test configdir setting : github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/3e...ig-defaults.php#L643

Denis is for sure the more competent person regarding this topic. Listen to him...

I didn't say it's easy . You must too have some way to update via CLI : github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/ma.../UpdateDbCommand.php