When you install Final Cut Server, by default you use http://127.0.0.1/finalcutserver as the path to install the client software. In a number of environments we've seen this end up getting broken for one reason or another. One easy way to fix this is to simply re-run the post-install.sh script from /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Server/Final Cut Server.bundle/Contents/Resources/sbin
However, this brings up the fact that very few Final Cut Servers are actually going to be hosting other websites. Therefore, in order to make things as easy as possible for administrators and end users, how might you go about making the path to access your client installer shorter?
For starters, let's manually create a symbolic link to fcs in /Library/WebServer/Documents/ to /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Server/Final Cut Server.bundle/Contents/Resources/php/webstart. Type the following (be sure to include the quotes):
sudo ln -s "/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Server/Final Cut Server.bundle/Contents/Resources/php/webstart" /Library/WebServer/Documents/fcs
Next, test it. Open a browser and where you used to use finalcutserver now try to simply use fcs (eg - from the server it would be http://127.0.0.1/fcs). Now let's make it even shorter. We're going to change the documentroot in Apache to be the symbolic link we just created. First backup your httpd.conf file:
cp /etc/apache2/httpd.conf ~/Desktop/httpd.conf.bak
Then open /etc/apache2/httpd.conf with elevated privileges (eg - sudo) in your favorite text editor (pico, vi, TextWrangler) and change the following line:
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
To:
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents/fcs"
Now save the file and restart Apache:
sudo apachectl restart
At this point, if you simply type 127.0.0.1 in a web browser it should open up the Welcome to Final Cut Server page. At this point, in our customizations we're going to go a step further and customize the look and feel of webstart to use our own graphical elements. We're going to take a graphic of our own company logo and we're going to rename it to fcsvr_icon.png and then we're going to rename the fcsvr_icon.png file to fcsvr_icon.png.backup (all in the /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Server/Final Cut Server.bundle/Contents/Resources/php/webstart directory). Now when you refresh the page you will see your own logo rather than the default Final Cut Server splash.
The other graphical elements within webstart can also be customized as well in a similar fashion, or through editing the actual php files. Having said this, I'm not great with php and tend to break it.
So the warnings. Everything in this article can be broken/replaced with a single update from Apple. Apple could replace graphics with an updater package, edit the DocumentRoot for Apache (or just replace the actual httpd.conf file) or change the path for webstart. Furthermore, webstart itself can be broken if something is changed and you've customized it. Therefore, I strongly recommend backing up all of the files that were touched here prior to doing any alterations.