Practical Questions Regarding Rails

[Gybbyl]

There is a question that has been eating away at the back of my mind regarding Rails -- how does one run multiple applications on the same webserver?

Suppose I have three applications:

Depot
CleverWikiName
NewBlogIdea

Normally, I could easily work on any of these three, simply by starting the WEBrick server that is neatly placed in the script directory after I generate the skeleton.

I would access them thusly, after starting their respective servers (one at a time, or on different ports:

http://.../depot
http://.../clever_wiki_name
http://.../new_blog_idea

and let the default route take them to public/index.html.

Now, the $1,000,000 question is:

How can I set up my (WEBrick, if possible) server so that I can have all three applications running at the same time, on the same port?

Further, how can I set up my WEBrick/Apache server so that I can have (say) a rails application in

http://.../depot

and a regular CGI ruby application in

http://.../hiki



Thanks!

[sweatje]

I am sure there are others who have more robust solutions, but for the couple of examples I was playing around with at home, I set up a reverse proxy in my apache server to redirect various subdirectory to differnt instances of webbrick running behind my firewall. Something like:

ProxyRequests On
ProxyVia On
ProxyPass /app1/ http://localhost:3000/

[vgarcia]

Is there any particular reason you don't want to set up separate subdomains/domains as VirtualHosts? That's what I do for local Apache/Rails development.

[sweatje]

I think the example I posted was localhost, but when I was actually playing with it, rails was running on a differernt box behind my firewall. I think the reverse proxy was the easiest way to expose it on a standard port.

[Gybbyl]

Is there any particular reason you don't want to set up separate subdomains/domains as VirtualHosts?

No, not at all -- I'm just so used to the PHP development/deployment system of "drag and drop" that it was like running into a (web)brick wall when I tried to deploy two Rails apps

set up a reverse proxy in my apache server to redirect various subdirectory to differnt instances of webbrick running behind my firewall. Something like:

I think that's exactly what I'm going to do. Everything I tried before involved unconventional apache or lighttpd configurations; I preferred using WEBBrick in the first place.

Thank you both for your ideas. I guess I was just looking at the problem the wrong way

[Gybbyl]

Ok, update.

I tried using the apache-reverse-proxy technique, and it didn't quite work out for me. It would successfully forward to the WEBBrick server, yes, but all of the relative URLs in the application itself were screwed up (url_for() obviously doesn't itself know about the proxy/forwarding going on in Apache). I could maybe have changed this by editing some configuration in Apache or Rails, but "convention over configuration" is the whole reason I'm doing the Rails thing, so that didn't seem like the appropriate path to take.

I found a little apache module called "scgi" (which, unlike the fastcgi module, worked) and it's associated ruby library (conveniently packaged as a .gem), installed it, ran it in my rails apps directory so that it could create some configuration information, and then added some info to my httpd.conf script, and viola! I'm running 3 apps on one server just as I wanted.

For anyone else whom this may help, this is where I got the information.

[kyko]

As far as running multiple apps on WebBrick it is very easy just use -p <portnumber). just type it in the command line for example:

script/server -p 3500

and use different ports for different apps