Project:Webapps

Project Description
The Gentoo webapp team maintains most web applications available via Portage. In addition, we provide the webapp-config utility that allows users to install ebuilds into different virtual hosts.

We are also responsible for the webapp.eclass that allows to prepare web applications for installation with webapp-config.

Project Goals
Our goal is to make Gentoo the best platform for installing and maintaining web applications. To achieve this goal, we work closely with several other herds such as Apache and PHP.

Resources
Resources offered by the Web-apps project are:
 * webapp-config Documentation
 * webapp.eclass Documentation

Herds
The Web-apps project maintains the following herds:

#gentoo-web on irc.freenode.net
The best way to reach us is on IRC. Please feel free to stop by to talk about  or about web applications on Gentoo. We also welcome any suggestions for improvement.

gentoo-web-user@gentoo.org
The Gentoo web applications team uses the mailing list for discussions related to web applications and. This is a low-volume list.

To subscribe to this mailing list, send an empty e-mail to. Once subscribed, you can post by sending an e-mail to.

Web application overlay
Web applications in general tend to be a severe security liability. They are designed to communicate with the outside world and need to deal with a range of input from the Internet. Since it is often hard for developers to foresee all types of malicious input, security flaws are being detected rather frequently in the apps we maintain.

To reduce the impact of such incidents while still offering a wide range of different web applications, we created a Portage overlay that contains ebuilds for applications that we do not want to maintain in the main tree. Such applications either lack a developer willing to maintain it in Portage or have not been reviewed for security.

The overlay is an ideal playground for new developers wishing to join our team. Once we see that you are capable of writing ebuilds of reasonable quality, we can provide you with commit rights to the overlay.