# OSX apache2 final-stage setup hints? **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [March 6, 2007, 3:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868 "2007-03-06T15:22:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 3:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/1 "2007-03-06T15:22:31Z")
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](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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 3:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/2 "2007-03-06T15:34:15Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 4:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/3 "2007-03-06T16:12:00Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 4:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/4 "2007-03-06T16:25:27Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 6:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/5 "2007-03-06T18:10:26Z")
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.) ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 11:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/6 "2007-03-06T23:52:48Z")
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](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. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 4:41am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/7 "2007-03-07T04:41:11Z")
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: \ ServerName [myapp.com](http://myapp.com) ServerAlias [www.myapp.com](http://www.myapp.com) ProxyPass / [http://127.0.0.1:8000/](http://127.0.0.1:8000/) ProxyPassReverse / [http://127.0.0.1:8000](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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 1:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/8 "2007-03-07T13:53:32Z")
Addendum: the style sheet gets used if I add DocumentRoot (PATH\_TO\_MY\_APP)/public but the links are still broken. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 12:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/9 "2007-03-07T12:53:50Z")
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!) \ ServerName [myapp.com](http://myapp.com) ServerAlias [myapp.com](http://myapp.com) ProxyPass /myapp/ [http://127.0.0.1:8000/](http://127.0.0.1:8000/) ProxyPassReverse /myapp/ [http://127.0.0.1:8000/](http://127.0.0.1:8000/) ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 3:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/10 "2007-03-07T15:12:37Z")
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!) > > \ > ServerName [myapp.com](http://myapp.com) > ServerAlias [myapp.com](http://myapp.com) > ProxyPass /myapp/ [http://127.0.0.1:8000/](http://127.0.0.1:8000/) > ProxyPassReverse /myapp/ [http://127.0.0.1:8000/](http://127.0.0.1:8000/) Okay two more changes. In your httpd.conf setup change it to: \ ServerName [myapp.com](http://myapp.com) ServerAlias [myapp.com](http://myapp.com) ProxyPass /myapp [http://127.0.0.1:8000/myapp](http://127.0.0.1:8000/myapp) ProxyPassReverse /myapp [http://127.0.0.1:8000/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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 4:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/11 "2007-03-07T16:17:17Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 4:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/12 "2007-03-07T16:46:56Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 5:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/13 "2007-03-07T17:24:05Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 5:18pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/14 "2007-03-07T17:18:34Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 5:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/15 "2007-03-07T17:45:12Z")
> 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’); ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 6:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/16 "2007-03-07T18:44:24Z")
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](http://127.0.0.1:8000/myapp/images) with no Alias – Michael W. ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2007, 7:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/17 "2007-03-07T19:23:20Z")
_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. \ ServerName [MYAPP.com](http://MYAPP.com) ServerAlias [MYAPP.com](http://MYAPP.com) ProxyPass /MYAPP [http://127.0.0.1:8000/MYAPP](http://127.0.0.1:8000/MYAPP) ProxyPassReverse /MYAPP [http://127.0.0.1:8000/MYAPP](http://127.0.0.1:8000/MYAPP) ProxyPass /images [http://127.0.0.1:8000/MYAPP/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 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@dankitania](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dankitania)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2007, 3:14am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/osx-apache2-final-stage-setup-hints/87868/18 "2007-03-08T03:14:46Z")
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 😃 – Michael W.