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I do alot of development in Rails recently, and it all goes fine and nice, and Rails is fast and easy to use, but sometimes I'm better off using already existing PHP scripts. Just place them into Rails project, and they just work (think of PHP-based web forms etc).

How do you setup your Apache & Mongrel cluster based Rails project to support execution of PHP scripts inside the Rails project structure? Very easy, actually.

If you use setup like mine, you have something like the following in the Apache httpd.conf file:

 ##########################################################################
##  myserver.com
##########################################################################
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName myserver.com
ServerAlias www.myserver.com

DocumentRoot /var/www/myserver

<Proxy balancer://mongrel_cluster>
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8200
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8201
</Proxy>

<Directory "/var/www/myserver">
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://mongrel_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]
</VirtualHost>

This is just a basic Apache-based Mongrel cluster driven setup.

Now, say, you decide to put a PHP-based mailform inside your Rails project, accessible by myserver.com/mailform/mailform.php path.

Here's what you need to do. All modifications are performed in httpd.conf file (or a different place in case you don't have virtual server configuration defined not in default place).

First, make sure you change the document root to the full path to your Rails project public directory:

DocumentRoot /var/www/myserver/current/public

Second, add the following right after RewriteEngine on directive :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/mailform.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1 [L]

By doing this, you basically instruct Apache to not pass requests to urls starting with /mailform , to Rails. So requests will be processed by default server rules, not by Rails.

Of course you need to have PHP support available to Apache for PHP scripts to work :) And just in case php was compiled in after rails stuff was setup, you might need to add the following to the bottom of httpd.conf:

 AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

That's it :)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Apache, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Servers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.