Phpbb forum with rails application

Rails
1

I would like to knock up a phpbb forum with a rails application.
I wanted to do this as I want to use ActiveRecord to crawl through the
user database in the rails app.

Is there a way to do this - on the same domain name and server…

Or does it depend how the server is setup?

2

Okay, I see what you mean now.

I wasn’t entirely sure but I think I understand that there are several
ways to go around this, one of them is your method. Another one would be
to declare several fastcgi.server in lighttpd for different subdomains.

I just read up on reverse proxying with Apache (I haven’t done anything
like this before) and it seems I can do a ProxyPassReverse and point
/foo/ to a subdomain that has been setup (presumebly a virtual host
which points to the lighttpd server?) - which solves the problem of not
wanting a subdomain. Am I on the right lines?

Also, wouldn’t it be easier if one declares all those in the lighttpd
config? How would I host it on lighty, again, without subdomains? Would
it be proxying again (with lighty, of course)?

Many thanks.

3

I think it depends on how the server was setup. Are you using shared
hosting
or do you have a dedicated server and what is the setup for rails and
for
php on your server? I did something like this before - where I had a
php
app and rails app sharing the same database. What I did was…

-setup apache with mod_proxy and php and use it to serve the php files
as
normal.
-setup lighttpd to run the rails app on a higher port
-setup apache virtual hosts to proxy requests to the rails app or
directly
serve the php pages depending on the url.

cheers,

AF

4

i just finished integrating this and it took some time. Someone here on
the
list wrote up a really nice page on the wiki about it which helped a
great
deal. I spent a good deal of time working with sessions mostly. What i
ended up doing was making my sessions table the phpbb sessions table
(phpbb_sessions) and making the session_id cookie the same as phpbb for
rails and phpbb so that if i logged into my rails app i was already
logged
into the forum, and vice versa. I then setup a before_filter in
application.rb to check for, say a phpbb cookie to then load the session
data like this

…
elsif cookies[:fscookie_sid] && session[:user].nil?
sess = Session.find_by_session_id(cookies[:fscookie_sid],
:include =>
“user”)

   if sess && sess.session_user_id > 1

    session[:user] = Hash.new
    session[:user] = sess.user.attributes

    session[:zip] = session[:user]["zipcode"]
    setlocation(session[:zip]) && setdeflocation if session[:zip]

    session.model.session_user_id = sess.user.user_id
    session.model.session_ip = encode_ip
    session.model.session_time = Time.now
    session.model.session_logged_in = 1

   elsif sess && sess.session_user_id == 0
     session.model.session_user_id = 1
   end

 end

One thing I did notice is that for some reason the default value of ‘1’
wasnt being used in the database, so I had to manually set the user_id
to 1
if it was a “guest” user. Still havent figured out why.

If you need any more help you can find me on the rails webchat at
http://www.railswebchat.com

adam

http://www.railswebchat.com