# Using Radiant with Rails apps, but "the other way round" **URL:** \ **Category:** Radiant CMS\ **Created:** [October 27, 2007, 2:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-radiant-with-rails-apps-but-the-other-way-round/118447 "2007-10-27T02:01:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcelo_a)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 2:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-radiant-with-rails-apps-but-the-other-way-round/118447/1 "2007-10-27T02:01:55Z")
Hey, guys. I am considering using Radiant to run my site, since I just love its simplicity and extensibility. This is a great product, thank you for writing it! So here’s my question: What if I want to use Radiant to run the root of my site, but I want to have different apps in it, running from subdirectories / subdomains? I’ll try to explain a bit better: Say I install Radiant in my site, at [http://www.example.com/](http://www.example.com/). I manage my blog and static pages from Radiant, and everything is beautiful. Then I want to write a small Rails app of my own and host it in [http://www.example.com/myapp/](http://www.example.com/myapp/). I figured I’d just have a symlink inside Radiant’s public/ dir to myapp/public, but I am not sure all the rewriting .htaccess magic will “just work”, since, as I understand it, Apache might think an address like [http://www.example.com/myapp/mycontroller/myaction/](http://www.example.com/myapp/mycontroller/myaction/) is actually something to be redirected to Radiant, and not to MyApp. Does anyone here have any experience with such settings? Thanks a lot, and keep up the great work! Marcelo. ---
**Author:** ![marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcelo_a)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 4:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-radiant-with-rails-apps-but-the-other-way-round/118447/2 "2007-10-27T16:21:40Z")
Marcelo, If you don’t require any integration between Radiant and your other applications, the proper way to do it would be in your webserver configuration, with rewrite rules, perhaps. Then your apps don’t need to necessarily know about each other. This is the way we did it at KCKCC, with Litespeed web server. For example: [http://kckcc.edu/](http://kckcc.edu/) (Radiant) [http://kckcc.edu/college-support-services/buildings-and-grounds/events/](http://kckcc.edu/college-support-services/buildings-and-grounds/events/) (A room reservation calendar, separate Rails app) [http://kckcc.edu/library/morgue](http://kckcc.edu/library/morgue) (A journal index Rails app) [http://kckcc.edu/academics/class-schedules](http://kckcc.edu/academics/class-schedules) (The POST location of the form is a Perl script on another box, through proxy) As you can see, there are lots of ways to make your apps look integrated into your main site. Sean ---
**Author:** ![marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcelo_a)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 10:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-radiant-with-rails-apps-but-the-other-way-round/118447/3 "2007-10-27T22:51:25Z")
Hi, Sean. I appreciate your help, and that’s exactly what I had in mind. So, I think I know how to get this to work, but could you just confirm it for me? What I’m thinking is that I’d have to edit the .htaccess file on the root directory (which is Radiant’s public directory) and make Apache bypass the rewriting for this directory. Something like: # myRadiantApp/public/.htaccess: RewriteCond %{REQUEST\_URI} ^/myOtherApp\* RewriteRule .\* - [L] And then the .htaccess file inside /myOtherApp would catch those requests and use its own rewriting rules to make everything work. Is this how that’s supposed to work? I imagine I might have to tweak it here and there a little bit, but do you think this is generally how it should work? Thank you again (both for Radiant and for the help), Marcelo. ---
**Author:** ![marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcelo_a)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 11:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-radiant-with-rails-apps-but-the-other-way-round/118447/4 "2007-10-27T23:55:08Z")
Hmmmmmm, ok, got it. The problem is I use a shared RailsPlayground account… So that’s Apache + FCGI, and no httpd.conf access. I guess that would be too much of a pain, then? Thanks again, Marcelo. ---
**Author:** ![marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcelo_a)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 11:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-radiant-with-rails-apps-but-the-other-way-round/118447/5 "2007-10-27T23:52:13Z")
Marcelo, Unless you’re using FCGI to host your Radiant and other apps, I would advise against using the .htaccess. It’s better to do the configuration in a regular config file, whether the main Apache httpd.conf or an included file. I would also either alias given URL paths to your other apps’ public directories or use rewrite rules to proxy to the proper Mongrel-cluster. Placing them as soft links inside your Radiant app is probably not advisable – it could get too unpredictable. Sean ---
**Author:** ![marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcelo_a)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2007, 5:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-radiant-with-rails-apps-but-the-other-way-round/118447/6 "2007-10-28T17:31:09Z")
If you have access to Webmin or something of the sort, you could still setup aliases and directories. Sean ---
**Author:** ![marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@marcelo\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcelo_a)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2007, 2:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-radiant-with-rails-apps-but-the-other-way-round/118447/7 "2007-10-29T02:10:37Z")
Yeah, I have cPanel, which might do the trick. But then that is not really a Radiant question, so I’ll try to figure that out on my own. Thanks a lot for the pointers, that helped me a lot. Cheers, Marcelo.