Introduction
What to do
Making personal profile URLs shorter
A note on suEXEC
Even shorter profile URLs
Changing configuration of a running sytem
Other files that might need to be served statically
Apache 2 specific configuration
ACIS is a pretty complicated application. It both gives a web interface to users and it produces web-accessible objects. For all this to work, it needs to know how to reference itself and where to create other objects and how to reference them.
If you are making a real-world public ACIS-based service, you want ACIS to be available via a short URL and you want it to produce short and nice URLs. For this you need to adapt Apache configuration. The particular adaptation depends on your choices for the ACIS configuration parameters. In simplest case, i.e. if you don’t change the configuration, your URLs will be a bit unwieldy.
Exact reasons to touch Apache configuration:
You may want ACIS to sit at the root address of a
website. E.g. http://web.site.org/ versus
http://web.site.org/cgi-bin/acis.pl. See
configuration parameter base-url.
You may want ACIS to generate short and clean URLs for
the users’ profile pages. Short and clean would be
something like http://web.site.org/pro/pcl2/,
long and dirty would be like
http://web.site.org/pro/p/c/l/2/ or even worse.
See configuration options
compact-redirected-profile-urls and
profile-pages-dir.
You may want to have the same URL value as your static-base-url and your base-url, which implies simply shorter and nicer URLs.
Here are the instructions for Apache 1.3+. If you want ACIS to work with Apache 2, there is a little difference.
Assume you have a site web.site.org and
want to run ACIS on it and you have default settings for
most parameters.
A normal CGI script has address
of something like, …/cgi-bin/script.pl, but you
want your users to access ACIS through the shortest
http://web.site.org/ address. Then we have to do
the following.
First, we enable mod_rewrite in our <VirtualHost> section:
RewriteEngine on
Second, we rewrite all incomming requests so that Apache
transfers them all to ACIS. Let’s assume the actual ACIS
CGI script is at
http://web.site.org/cgi-bin/acis.pl address. Add
this:
RewriteRule ^(/.*)$ /cgi-bin/acis.pl$1 [L,T=application/x-httpd-cgi]
Let us call this line “the terminal rule line”; although it is the first rule we introduce, it actually always must be the last one of all rewrite rules used. This rule means: pass all requests for the website to ACIS.
But ACIS includes and produces some static files, which also have to be web-accessible. The personal profile pages are the most important ones. We need to configure Apache to serve those requests by itself, without involving ACIS. One of the ways to do that is to add
RewriteRule ^/static/ - [L]
before the previous RewriteRule. So together that may look like this:
RewriteEngine on
# static files:
RewriteRule ^/static/ - [L]
# terminal rule:
RewriteRule ^(/.*)$ /cgi-bin/acis.pl$1 [L,T=application/x-httpd-cgi]
Then Apache will pass to /cgi-bin/acis.pl all
requests except those starting with /static/. So you
can set static-base-url to
http://web.site.org/static and
static-base-dir to a corresponding directory name.
The personal profile URLs will then have form of
http://web.site.org/static/profile/p/s/i/d/1/,
which is not very nice, but if its OK for you, let it be so.
In case you don’t like that, read on.
A first thing we could do is remove the static/ part.
For that we replace the respective RewriteRule with several
others.
RewriteEngine on
# static files:
RewriteRule ^/style/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^/script/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^/profile/ - [L]
# terminal rule:
RewriteRule ^(/.*)$ /cgi-bin/acis.pl$1 [L,T=application/x-httpd-cgi]
This will make requests for stylesheets, javascript files
and for profile pages served directly by Apache, and
everything else will be taken by ACIS. Now we can set
static-base-url to http://web.site.org and
static-base-dir to its apporpriate docroot,
e.g. /home/user/public_html.
A second thing we could
do to make personal profile URLs human friendly is eliminate
the slash characters in p/s/i/d/1 part. Here comes
the next set of rewrite rules:
RewriteRule ^/profile/p([a-z][a-z0-9]+[0-9])(/(.*))?$ /P/$1/$3
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /profile/p/$1/$2/$3/$4/$5/$6 [L]
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /profile/p/$1/$2/$3/$4/$5 [L]
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /profile/p/$1/$2/$3/$4 [L]
If placed before our static files rules in the Apache
configuration, it
will make requests like /profile/psid1/ map to
actual files as if it was a request for
/profile/p/s/i/d/1/. Now to let ACIS know we did
that, we set compact-redirected-profile-urls to a
true value.
Now we have a reasonably good setup: the URLs are clean of cruft. To summarize we have the foolowing in our Apache conf <VirtualHost> section:
RewriteEngine on
# compact-redirected unique part of personal profile URLs
RewriteRule ^/profile/p([a-z][a-z0-9]+[0-9])(/(.*))?$ /P/$1/$3
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /profile/p/$1/$2/$3/$4/$5/$6 [L]
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /profile/p/$1/$2/$3/$4/$5 [L]
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /profile/p/$1/$2/$3/$4 [L]
# static files:
RewriteRule ^/style/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^/script/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^/profile/ - [L]
# terminal rule:
RewriteRule ^(/.*)$ /cgi-bin/acis.pl$1 [L,T=application/x-httpd-cgi]
And we have something like the following in our main.conf:
base-url = http://web.site.org
base-cgi-script-filename = /var/www/user-cgi-bin/acis.pl
home-url = http://web.site.org/
static-base-url = http://web.site.org
static-base-dir = /home/user/public_html
+compact-redirected-profile-urls
For security and common-sense considerations it makes a lot of sense to run ACIS CGI under suexec in Apache. This way you avoid a lot of permissions trouble.
One of the things you need to use suexec is your CGI scripts
must reside somewhere below global DocumentRoot directory.
That’s why in main.conf snippet above the
base-cgi-script-filename param points to a file in
/var/www/user-cgi-bin/ (assuming that the
global DocumentRoot is /var/www). To make
this directory correspond to your virtual host’s
/cgi-bin/ you use the following in apache conf
<VirtualHost> section:
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /var/www/user-cgi-bin/
With all the above you have a very reasonable setup. But there is one more little thing to know about making URLs short and clean.
We could do to make personal profile URLs even shorter by
replacing "/profile/" part with something like
"/pro/". For that, we use profile-pages-dir
parameter. We set it to "pro/" and we rewrite the
Apache conf to read:
...
# compact-redirected unique part of personal profile URLs
RewriteRule ^/pro/p([a-z][a-z0-9]+[0-9])(/(.*))?$ /P/$1/$3
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /pro/p/$1/$2/$3/$4/$5/$6 [L]
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /pro/p/$1/$2/$3/$4/$5 [L]
RewriteRule ^/P/(.)(.)(.)/(.*) /pro/p/$1/$2/$3/$4 [L]
# static files:
RewriteRule ^/style/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^/script/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^/pro/ - [L]
...
This is a straight "profile/" -> "pro/"
replacement.
An important thing to know about personal profile URLs is that once ACIS generates and assigns a profile URL, is stores it in the user’s profile and uses it from then onwards. If you change your setup, the previously-assigned profile URLs will still have the old format and ACIS will not rebuild them. The only case when ACIS rebuilds a profile URL is when it finds that it can’t write the profile page file to its place. Then it tries to generate a new URL and a new file pathname for it (using current configuration) and uses that.
That’s why you better settle static-base-dir, static-base-url, profile-pages-dir and compact-redirected-profile-urls configuration values from the start. And, of course, base-url and home-url.
If you run ACIS at a website’s top address, you may need or
prefer to serve some other files by Apache itself, without
involving ACIS. For instance, you may want to create
favourites icon /favicon.ico for your website, or
you want to create /robots.txt file. ACIS will not
serve such files. Requests for these files will only burden the
system and clutter the logs. You have to serve these files
with Apache. For that you simply have to add appropriate
RewriteRules to your config, before the terminal rule line:
RewriteRule ^/favicon.ico - [L]
RewriteRule ^/robots.txt - [L]
Do everything as described above.
If you have lines
# terminal rule:
RewriteRule ^(/.*)$ /cgi-bin/acis.pl$1 [L,T=application/x-httpd-cgi]
replace them with
# terminal rule:
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /cgi/acis.cgi/$1 [NS,PT]
It worked for Ivan Kurmanov. He hopes it helps you as well.
Generated: Wed Aug 29 22:59:09 2007
ACIS project, acis@openlib.org