Multiple Rails apps within one Apache VirtualHost

rubyonrails-talk
1

Has anyone configured multiple Rails apps within the same VirtualHost directive? I need to do this with the apps selected by the initial path. I'm using Apache 2.2.3 with mod_proxy_balancer and Rails 2.0.2.

In fact, non-Rails apps have to be configured within this VirtualHost also, but that problem has been solved via a Location directive. I tried a similar Location statement for the Rails apps with no success yet, so I thought I'd see if anyone has already done this. To date, I've only needed to configure one Rails app within a VirtualHost with what appears to be a fairly typical config.

Any info sources for more advanced Apache configuration for Rails would be appreciated.

Brian Adkins

2

Brian,

I would look at using mod_proxy to send different URLs to your rails apps if you need to do in one virtual host. You would start each app with mongrel_rails on X port and then config Apache like so:

#mongrel rails app#1 running on 3000 ProxyPass /yourapp_prefix http://<yourserver>:3000 ProxyPassReverse /yourapp_prefix http://<yourserver>:3000

#mongrel rails app#1 running on 3001 ProxyPass /yourapp2_prefix http://<yourserver>:3001 ProxyPassReverse /yourapp2_prefix http://<yourserver>:3001

The real issue you will run into with a VPS is memory usage. Some VPSs will kill your mongrel's if they hog resources. So you'll want to also run a cron script or "monit" to keep an eye on them.

3

Brian,

I would look at using mod_proxy to send different URLs to your rails apps if you need to do in one virtual host. You would start each app with mongrel_rails on X port and then config Apache like so:

#mongrel rails app#1 running on 3000 ProxyPass /yourapp_prefix http://<yourserver>:3000 ProxyPassReverse /yourapp_prefix http://<yourserver>:3000

I've seen some folks using the above (ProxyPass ProxyPassReverse), and others using the following (RewriteRule). Any advantages of one over the other?

# Redirect all non-static requests to cluster RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^/app1(.*)$ balancer://cluster1%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L] RewriteRule ^/app2(.*)$ balancer://cluster2%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

#mongrel rails app#1 running on 3001 ProxyPass /yourapp2_prefix http://<yourserver>:3001 ProxyPassReverse /yourapp2_prefix http://<yourserver>:3001

The real issue you will run into with a VPS is memory usage. Some VPSs will kill your mongrel's if they hog resources. So you'll want to also run a cron script or "monit" to keep an eye on them.

This is on a dedicated machine, not a VPS. The reason I need multiple Rails apps configured in the same VirtualHost is because we're already using the host name for another purpose - to identify an organization. We've specified a * wildcard DNS entry to allow handling any number of hosts (the apps will parse the hostname to determine organization). For example:

http://<orgname>.foo.com/rails1/controller/action/... http://<orgname>.foo.com/rails2/controller/action/... http://<orgname>.foo.com/nonrails1/... http://<orgname>.foo.com/nonrails2/...

The apps are written by one company and cooperate, but also have a degree of independence. I'd prefer to have each app provide its own location for static files for Apache to serve directly, so I think my main problem is finding a nice way to have the equivalent of a docroot per app. I could probably live with a solution that requires the rails app to share a directory tree - maybe via soft links.

4

The following solution seems to work fairly well for me so far:

I had to mess around with some additional RewriteRules to get Apache to serve static files instead of mongrel and to deal with Rails caching.