pastbedti.me » apache

Deploying a Sinatra app with Apache and Phusion Passenger a.k.a. mod_rack

Mathias Stjernström — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:01:30 +0000

My Sinatra + Apache + Passenger setup did not just run

Deploying a simple Sinatra rack application under Apache and Phusion Passenger turned out not work out of the box for me.

I already had a virtual host so I decided to deploy with passengers sub URI (sub URI documentation).

To make this work you’ll need Apache installed with Phusion Passenger setup (Passenger installation)

This is what I started with

This is my folders for the already existing website.

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# Existing homedir
/home/my_web/
# Current webroot
/home/my_web/htdocs

Creating folders and files for Sinatra

The first thing you want to do is to create folders and files for Sinatra.

1	mkdir /home/my_web/sinatra

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cd /home/my_web/sinatra
mkdir tmp
mkdir logs
mkdir public
touch app.rb
touch config.ru

Create symlink

Create a symbolic link from our current webroot to the new Sinatra app so that apache/passenger can find it.

1	ln -s /home/my_web/sinatra/public /home/my_web/htdocs/app

Creating the application

We also need a Sinatra application for this to work so lets fill those files.

File: config.ru

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require 'app'

set :environment, ENV['RACK_ENV'].to_sym
set :app_file, 'app.rb'
disable :run

log = File.new("logs/sinatra.log", "a")
STDOUT.reopen(log)
STDERR.reopen(log)

run Sinatra::Application

File: app.rb

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require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

before do
# Strip the last / from the path
request.env['PATH_INFO'].gsub!(/\/$/, '')
end

get '' do
"Hello world"
end

Apache configuration

Now we need to setup apache so that it can find our Sinatra app and load it.

The only thing you need to do is add the following line to your existing VirtualHost block:

1	RackBaseURI /app

This line will tell passenger to look into our existing webroot for a symlink thats named app and which points to our rack app. (RackBaseURI documentation)

Virtual host entry

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<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias example.com
DocumentRoot /home/my_web/htdocs/
RackBaseURI /app

<Directory "/home/my_web/htdocs/">
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
AllowOverride All
Directory>
VirtualHost>

The best part is that you are allowed to specify this option multiple times. So you can easily setup multiple apps under the same virtual host.

Cheers!

Password protecting folders with nginx gotcha

Mathias Stjernström — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:30:10 +0000

Today I was playing with nginx’s flv module. The page I made where private enough to password protect so i thought it would be great opportunity to learn how to do this with nginx.

When password protecting folders with apache I usually do something like this

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<Location /secret>
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Restricted Directory"
AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache/.htpasswd
Require user billg
Directory>

This code protects the folder named secret and everything below it.

Ok, get back get to nginx already!

Nginx also have a location module and this is how i first started out.

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location = /secret {
auth_basic "Restricted";
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/htpass;
}

First this seemed like a good idea. Accessing /secret got me authenticate and thats good. BUT! Accessing files below /secret like /secret/image.gif skipped authentication.

Using that equal sign was a big mistake. Equal sign matches exactly that string and nothing else.

To get this example working the way i want (just like the apache example) we have two ways to go.

1. We dump the equal sign,
2. We change the equal sign to a regular-expression sign (~).

Before choosing 1 or 2 you should know that when choosing 1. Rules with regular expressions and any longer conventional blocks will be matched before your rule. So my suggestion is to use a regular expression match so that nginx halts the search.

Alt 1.

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location /secret {
auth_basic "Restricted";
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/htpass;
}

Alt 2.

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location ~ ^/secret {
auth_basic "Restricted";
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/htpass;
}

Happy password protecting!

Cheers!

Putting a WordPress blog behind a nginx frontend (with a bit of cheating)

Mathias Stjernström — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:12:10 +0000

This is how I did a quick fix for a client of ours that are running a Ruby On Rails app behind an nginx/mongrel setup.

The mission where to move their wordpress weblog to the same server as the website.

The easiest way had been to add another IP and install apache behind it. They did not like this solution because they thought they where about to loose google page-rank if the blog and the website where on different ip’s. ok, Fair enough.

The simple solution became to install apache and just proxy the request thought nginx.

proxying with nginx cannot be any easier…. the first try.

Apache is listening on 127.0.0.1:8080 and we want /blog to be proxied to apache.

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location /blog/ {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
}

This seemed like a good idea but when apache gets this request the hostname is 127.0.0.1 and wordpress will not like that and will redirect to the host-name that we had setup in wordpress. Just as i write this post i realize that i could just have changed that to 127.0.0.1 and we had been done.

Sometimes you can’t see the Forest because of the trees…

I tok me a wile to figure that we where redirected again by wordpress so my solution became this:

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location /blog/ {
proxy_set_header Host www.example.se;
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
}

This make nginx set a Host header with each request so that apache think we are always on the correct host… Even doe we can solve this by setting 127.0.0.1 in wordpress this can be usefull if you have more that one wordpress installation behind nginx .

Happy hacking!

Cheers!