QGIS » QGIS Application

Please note that the solution to this issue should not rely on apache conf (rewrite and the like), to be more general (e.g. people is using QGIS behind Tomcat, etc.).

A good compatible solution with tomcat is the solution adopted by MapServer for its mapfile (we speak of svg but the question is the same)
http://www.mapserver.org/environment_variables.html

For the mapfile mapserver allow to define a
environ.variable named

MS_MAPFILE and read it when it start.

I know the SVG paths could be more than one, but there are two kind of solutions:
the first is point the env variable to a file where there is enumerate all the paths.
The second possible solution is to named the env variables with a common prefix and search all the variable having that prefix.

ie:

QGIS_SVG_1 = path1
QGIS_SVG_2 = path2
QGIS_SVG_3 = path3

Because there are potentially many options which may be useful also in server, I added to server support for QGIS_OPTIONS_PATH environment variable which sets path to a directory where settings are stored. It works in the same way as qgis application --optionspath option. Attention that default settings file name on UNIX is QGIS/QGIS2.conf, while with QGIS_OPTIONS_PATH or --optionspath it is QGIS/QGIS2.ini (.conf x .ini).

To specify SVG path for QGIS server you can copy user settings or create settings file, for example /path/to/config/QGIS/QGIS2.ini:

[svg]
searchPathsForSVG=/path/to/svg1|/path/to/svg2

SetEnv QGIS_OPTIONS_PATH "/path/to/config/" 

I tried to follow and set up configuration file, but wasn't successful - instead of symbols, only "?" are displayed. Is there some way to debug this?