simplest CMS design question

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all,

What would be the best design if I wanted a RubyOnRails basic CMS that would allow HTML/images to be uploaded and viewed by users who were allowed to see them. In particular what would be a good / robust way to host the files? For example:

a) Let Apache web server (i.e. not RoR engine) host them - this would require RoR could save the files out on the Unix/Linux box to an approach location under the web server (not sure how possible this is). Also it means that user management would need to be integrated/handled by Apache (could be an issue perhaps?)

b) Let RoR application store them in it's own directory area, but not under the "/public" directory as this could be visible on web for the right URL - once stored on file, then the image tag URL in the HTML pages would need to tell the RoR application to get them via a specific controller/action which would then have to retrieve them and stream them out...

c) As per b) above but stored in a mysql database

2

I’d go for Apache with the mod X-Sendfile compiled into it. There’s an option in the latest Rails version afaik to use it out of the box and in previous versions it’s just a matter of installing a plugin or crafting the headers yourself. It basically comes down to handling authentication etc with Rails and serving the file through Apache directly using a special header.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=rails+2.3+x+sendfile&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Best regards

Peter De Berdt