OSX apache2 final-stage setup hints?

Rails
1

Preamble: I hope people on this list will tolerate a question that,
while motivated by RoR, is not strictly about RoR. I’m trying to
let colleagues see a RoR site I’m developing, so I need to share the
pages. I’m an academic, and doing this experimentally, so commercial
hosting is not a possibility. I’d like to host the page on my desktop
machine, as I’ve been doing for years with (cough) PHP pages. It seems
that mongrel won’t let me share outside the box, and all the advice
suggests that I should be using apache2. I’ve followed along with quite
a few tutorials for installation and configuration, and things are
working fine locally. The problem is with sharing.

Problem: If I use the control-panel to turn web-sharing OFF, the system
uses apache-2, but it does NOT share pages to the outside world. If I
turn sharing ON, then it shares to the world, but it uses apache-1.

Question: Is there a trick to making the system share out apache-2
pages?

Details: I’ve created a startup item as described at
http://developer.apple.com/tools/subversionxcode.html. The system PATH
starts with /opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/opt/local/apache2/bin. A
“ps aux” reveals that if web-sharing is turned OFF, then I get the
apache-2 versions of httpd, but that if it’s turned ON, I get these, but
also apache-1 versions. This is why I think what I need to do is to
trick the web-sharing part of the control panel.

PS: again, I’m sorry to be asking a question that is not strictly about
RoR. I’m hoping it will be tolerated here, since it’s my guess that
there are others in the same boat. Surely it will be good for RoR when
folks can share pages easily from local machines, as they can with
(again, cough) PHP.

2

Dan K. wrote:

Preamble: I hope people on this list will tolerate a question that,
while motivated by RoR, is not strictly about RoR. I’m trying to
let colleagues see a RoR site I’m developing, so I need to share the
pages. I’m an academic, and doing this experimentally, so commercial
hosting is not a possibility. I’d like to host the page on my desktop
machine, as I’ve been doing for years with (cough) PHP pages. It seems
that mongrel won’t let me share outside the box, and all the advice
suggests that I should be using apache2. I’ve followed along with quite
a few tutorials for installation and configuration, and things are
working fine locally. The problem is with sharing.

You can use mongrel as your “outwards” facing Web server – just don’t
give it an “-a” parameter.

E.g. this restricts mongrel to “localhost” port 8000 only:

mongrel_rails start -d -p 8000 -a 127.0.0.1 -e production

This exposes mongrel to the outside world:

mongrel_rails start -d -p 8000 -e production

–
Michael W.

3

Thanks. Is there a trick to the URL, afterwards? For example, I do

mongrel_rails start -d -p 8000 -e production

but when I point to

http://(host):8000/(page)

it doesn’t respond, except if I’m accessing via the host machine.

Michael W. wrote:

This exposes mongrel to the outside world:

mongrel_rails start -d -p 8000 -e production

–
Michael W.

4

Dan K. wrote:

Thanks. Is there a trick to the URL, afterwards? For example, I do

mongrel_rails start -d -p 8000 -e production

but when I point to

http://(host):8000/(page)

it doesn’t respond, except if I’m accessing via the host machine.

Start Mongrel and do something like:

netstat --tcp --all --numeric | less

and look for the local address that’s bound to port 8000.

Is it 0.0.0.0:8000 or some internal-only facing IP address?

–
Michael W.

5

The netstat seems to take different arguments to those suggested.
Anyway, if I do

netstat -a -n

I see the line

tcp4       0      0  *.8000                 *.*

LISTEN

and I wonder if that tells me something? (I’m sorry to be such a pain,
but you see, you’ve got me all excited, thinking that I may get this
working today, after a long time of trying. Hence, I hope you’ll excuse
my ignorance.)

6

I don’t know about mongrel, but I’ve allowed a windows xp machine to
host pages on the same LAN as the accessor by just opening up the port
that the site is published to. For my situation I was using WEBrick on
port 3000 so I just opened up port 3000 in my firewall started the
server (script/server) and anyone on the same LAN as me could hit the
page by using my machine’s IP:3000 for me it was something like this
‘http://137.28.1.130:3000’ I imagine something similar would work on
OS X. As I have recently switched platforms for Rails development to
OS X and Textmate I’ll give it a try and let you know.

-Jon

On Mar 6, 11:10 am, Dan K. [email protected]

7

Dan K. wrote:

and I wonder if that tells me something? (I’m sorry to be such a pain,
but you see, you’ve got me all excited, thinking that I may get this
working today, after a long time of trying. Hence, I hope you’ll excuse
my ignorance.)

Alright it’s been a while since I’ve used BSD but that looks okay so the
next question is, do you have a firewall running? It sounds like there’s
something running on OS X that handles opening and closing ports for you
which is probably why Mongrel isn’t being seen by the outside world.

At this point it may be easier to just hook Mongrel up through Apache.
Unfortunately I’m also not an OS X user so I can’t tell you how to
fiddle with that Control Panel and the different versions of Apache you
have installed to get that to work with Apache 2.

If you want to try it with Apache 1.3 you can do something like this.
Setup Mongrel with the -a switch and set it to 127.0.0.1 like in my
previous example. Then in your Apache httpd.conf file you would have
something like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName myapp.com
ServerAlias www.myapp.com

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8000

Change ServerName and ServerAlias as appropriate or leave them that way
if you just want somebody to access your box by your IP.

The ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives requires that you have the
mod_proxy module installed so you’ll need to check for these two lines
in httpd.conf:

LoadModule proxy_module libexec/libproxy.so

AddModule mod_proxy.c

The above instructions work on Linux but I don’t know if OS X handles
the Apache config differently.

–
Michael W.

8

Addendum: the style sheet gets used if I add

DocumentRoot (PATH_TO_MY_APP)/public

but the links are still broken.

9

I’m starting to see light at the end of this tunnel…

Do I need to do any tricks with directories? If I do as suggested
(proxying to “/”), then I lose the rest of the machine’s pages. So I
tried as at the end of this post. This halfway works: if I browse to
“http://(MY_HOST)/myapp/(A_PAGE)”, where “A_PAGE” is the name of a page
in my app, then I get the page, but no style sheet. Also, the links in
the page don’t work. The links are going to e.g.
“http://(MY_HOST)/(ANOTHER_PAGE)”, i.e. the “myapp” part is missing in
the links.

The link/css issues seem to stem from a problem in the construction of
relative filenames.

Q: Is there an additional trick with apache?

BTW, I also tried proxying to “/myapp”, i.e. without the trailing slash,
but that leads to “page does not exist” errors on all but the
rails-supplied “welcome aboard” page.

OK, so here is what I have so far. I’ve done the other suggested things
to my http.conf, and it passes cleanly through a /usr/sbin/apachectl
stop/configtest/start cycle (NB. I’m here being careful to use apache
1.3, not the apache 2.0 that I had previously thought I would be
required to use, which is how this thread got started!)

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName myapp.com
ServerAlias myapp.com
ProxyPass /myapp/ http://127.0.0.1:8000/
ProxyPassReverse /myapp/ http://127.0.0.1:8000/

10

Dan K. wrote:

to my http.conf, and it passes cleanly through a /usr/sbin/apachectl
stop/configtest/start cycle (NB. I’m here being careful to use apache
1.3, not the apache 2.0 that I had previously thought I would be
required to use, which is how this thread got started!)

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName myapp.com
ServerAlias myapp.com
ProxyPass /myapp/ http://127.0.0.1:8000/
ProxyPassReverse /myapp/ http://127.0.0.1:8000/

Okay two more changes.

In your httpd.conf setup change it to:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName myapp.com
ServerAlias myapp.com
ProxyPass /myapp http://127.0.0.1:8000/myapp
ProxyPassReverse /myapp http://127.0.0.1:8000/myapp

Then in your command line that starts Mongrel (you’ll need a recent
version of Mongrel for this) you need to add:

–prefix /myapp

E.g.:

mongrel_rails start -d -p 8000
-a 127.0.0.1
-e production
–prefix /myapp

–
Michael W.

11

Michael, you’re a gem. Links work, and the style sheet is being obeyed.

The one remaining problem is images – they are not showing up.

PS. I have Mongrel Web Server 1.0.1

12

Dan K. wrote:

Michael, you’re a gem. Links work, and the style sheet is being obeyed.

The one remaining problem is images – they are not showing up.

That should work with just the DocumentRoot pointing to the public
directory within the VirtualHost directive. Did you put the images
somewhere else? When you view the source of the page, what path is it
using for the images?

You could try something like this within VirtualHost:

ProxyPass /myapp/images !
Alias /myapp/images /path/to/public/images

assuming it’s trying to use /myapp/images as the path to the images in
the source.

–
Michael W.

13

Dan K. wrote:

Alias /(APPNAME)/images APP_PATH)/public/images

test 3

ProxyPass /(APPNAME)/public/images !
Alias /(APPNAME)/public/images APP_PATH)/public/images

Where are you setting DocumentRoot? Do you have any funky mod_rewrite
stuff (RewriteCond, RewriteRule, etc.) going on?

If you view source on one of your Rails pages with an image, what’s the
URL it is trying to access?

–
Michael W.

14

Um, none of the following works. My images are in
(MY_APP)/public/images.

test 1

ProxyPass /images !
Alias /images (APP_PATH)/public/images

test 2

ProxyPass /(APPNAME)/images !
Alias /(APPNAME)/images APP_PATH)/public/images

test 3

ProxyPass /(APPNAME)/public/images !
Alias /(APPNAME)/public/images APP_PATH)/public/images

Michael, you’re being amazingly patient with this.

15

Where are you setting DocumentRoot?

I’m not setting DocumentRoot inside the , because I found
that if I did so, my other pages disappeared.

Do you have any funky mod_rewrite
stuff (RewriteCond, RewriteRule, etc.) going on?

Well, nothing that I have set myself. I do see the following in the
file, though.

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACE RewriteRule .* - [F]

If you view source on one of your Rails pages with an image, what’s the
URL it is trying to access?

The images are being accessed from the stylesheet. I should have
pointed that out. For example, in

(MY_APP)/public/stylesheets/style.css

I have a line like the following:

background-image: url(’/images/background-01.jpg’);

16

Dan K. wrote:

The images are being accessed from the stylesheet. I should have
pointed that out. For example, in

(MY_APP)/public/stylesheets/style.css

I have a line like the following:

background-image: url(‘/images/background-01.jpg’);

Okay try it like this:

ProxyPass /images http://127.0.0.1:8000/myapp/images

with no Alias

–
Michael W.

17

success at last! Michael, thank you so much for your very generous
help, and for your patience through so many exchanges.

For the sake of anyone else who is trying this, below I’ve got the
recipe that worked for me. Here, MYAPP stands for the application name
and URL stands for the URL of the application (although I haven’t used
that).

  1. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

OSX + Apache-1.3 + mongrel_rails-1.0.1 rails-1.2.2

  1. INSTRUCTIONS

2.1 Setup

Add the /private/etc/httpd.conf, where MYAPP is the name of the
application.

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName MYAPP.com
ServerAlias MYAPP.com
ProxyPass /MYAPP http://127.0.0.1:8000/MYAPP
ProxyPassReverse /MYAPP http://127.0.0.1:8000/MYAPP
ProxyPass /images http://127.0.0.1:8000/MYAPP/images

Then do

/usr/sbin/apachectl stop
/usr/sbin/apachectl configtest
/usr/sbin/apachectl start

and be sure that there are no errors.

2.2 Start the server

Run the following to start the server

mongrel_rails start -d -p 8000 -a 127.0.0.1 -e production --prefix
/MYAPP

  1. CONCLUSIONS

Some people are awfully nice on the web, helping out strangers :slight_smile:

18

Dan K. wrote:

success at last! Michael, thank you so much for your very generous
help, and for your patience through so many exchanges.

It probably would’ve been easier to ask an OS X guru how to open up a
port for Mongrel :smiley:

–
Michael W.