Simplest CMS design question

Rails
1

Hi all,

What would be the best design if I wanted a RubyOnRails basic CMS that
would allow HTML/images to be uploaded and viewed by users who were
allowed to see them. In particular what would be a good / robust way
to host the files? For example:

a) Let Apache web server (i.e. not RoR engine) host them - this would
require RoR could save the files out on the Unix/Linux box to an
approach location under the web server (not sure how possible this
is). Also it means that user management would need to be
integrated/handled by Apache (could be an issue perhaps?)

b) Let RoR application store them in it’s own directory area, but not
under the “/public” directory as this could be visible on web for the
right URL - once stored on file, then the image tag URL in the HTML
pages would need to tell the RoR application to get them via a
specific controller/action which would then have to retrieve them and
stream them out…

c) As per b) above but stored in a mysql database

–
Greg
http://blog.gregnet.org/

2

On 20 Sep 2009, at 13:14, Greg H. wrote:

b) Let RoR application store them in it’s own directory area, but not
under the “/public” directory as this could be visible on web for the
right URL - once stored on file, then the image tag URL in the HTML
pages would need to tell the RoR application to get them via a
specific controller/action which would then have to retrieve them and
stream them out…

c) As per b) above but stored in a mysql database

I’d go for Apache with the mod X-Sendfile compiled into it. There’s an
option in the latest Rails version afaik to use it out of the box and
in previous versions it’s just a matter of installing a plugin or
crafting the headers yourself. It basically comes down to handling
authentication etc with Rails and serving the file through Apache
directly using a special header.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=rails+2.3+x+sendfile&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Best regards

Peter De Berdt