Cobalt Edge

Ok, first, apologies for the title of this entry, there wasn't exactly a concise way to title what this is about :) So, here's a better description of what this entry is about...

I needed to setup a WordPress blog for a client, but they needed the blog to be located as a subdirectory of their primary domain name, as opposed to its own domain name or a subdomain. Furthermore, we use Nginx for all our web servers, and so needed to be able to configure Nginx both on the main domain name serving infrastructure, as well as the machine that would host the blog. There were some other writeups on the web, but none quite covered this case - basically the complication of proxying to it, as well as WordPress being in a "subdirectory" in terms of the path. So, here's how I got it working.

But first, a quick intermission. This was made possible by the fine support folks at EngineYard, in particular David S, but others as well. They provided the solution to the final problem we ran into, as well as a few tips along the way. Our primary servers and testing/staging systems are hosted at EngineYard, but the WordPress blog is actually on a Slicehost slice, so double thanks to them, as even though part of it involved their systems, part did not. As so many others have said, EngineYard is really superb, and absolutely worth the price. Getting on with it...

I'm going to do this not precisely in the order I did it, but the idea is to cut out my missteps and just give you (and me for future reference) a recipe for this.

Setup the Wordpress Server

For me this was an Ubuntu 8/Hardy machine, using MySQL as the DB, and WordPress 2.6.1, with Nginx as the web server. Presuming you have a base Ubuntu install, you may or may not need all these steps (e.g. you may already have PHP):

Install PHP CGI, and PHP MySQL components:

sudo aptitude install php5-cgi php5-mysql

Install Lighttpd to get the spawn-fcgi program that will take care of handling PHP FastCGI requests, but then stop Lighttpd and remove its daemon service:

sudo aptitude install lighttpd
sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd stop
sudo rm /etc/init.d/lighttpd
sudo update-rc.d lighttpd remove

Next, setup the spawn-fcgi program to run as a daemon. You need to pick a port you'll use, in my case I happened to choose 53987 (at random). The following daemon script should be placed in /etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi or a name you like. Note that this is somewhat specific to Ubuntu, but likely works on similar distros or can be adapted for RedHat-based ones, etc.:

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          nginx
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:     $all
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts FastCGI for PHP
# Description:       starts FastCGI for PHP using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
NAME=spawn-fcgi
DESC=spawn-fcgi
DAEMON_OPTS="-f /usr/bin/php-cgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 53987"
test -x $DAEMON || exit 0
set -e
case "$1" in
  start)
        echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  stop)
        echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec $DAEMON
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  restart|force-reload)
        echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
        sleep 1
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  reload)
      echo -n "Reloading $DESC configuration: "
      start-stop-daemon --stop --signal HUP --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
          --exec $DAEMON
      echo "$NAME."
      ;;
  *)
        N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
        echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
esac
exit 0

Then make it a daemon by doing:

cd /etc/init.d
sudo update-rc.d spawn-fcgi defaults

Now install the WordPress files and setup the database

Download the latest tarball, and unpack it where you want it to be. In my case, this was in /var/www/wordpress/blog. Note the sort of double directory there. That is because the subdirectory within the path that the blog is accessible at is "blog", i.e. http://www.example.com/blog. The key here is that the directory name that WordPress ultimately lives in, needs to be the same as the subdirectory in the path of the URL.

Follow steps 1-5 of the WordPress install guide, where you setup the database, etc.

Install and Configure Nginx:

sudo aptitude install nginx

My configuration file for Nginx, which lives in /etc/nginx/sites-available/blog, and is symlinked from /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/blog, looks like this:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name blog.example.com;
  root /var/www/wordpress;
  index  index.php;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/blog.access.log;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/blog.error.log notice;
  location / {
    root /var/www/wordpress;
    index index.php;
    # this serves static files that exist without running other rewrite tests
    if (-f $request_filename) {
      expires 30d;
      break;
    }
    # this sends all non-existing file or directory requests to index.php
    if (!-e $request_filename) {
      rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
    }
  }
  location ~ .php$ {
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:53345;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/wordpress$fastcgi_script_name;
    root /var/www/wordpress;
  }
}

In the above configuration file, if you didn't locate your WordPress install at /var/www/wordpress/blog, then you need to edit the various /var/www/wordpress paths you find. Also, adjust the port number as needed, and any of the paths to log files, etc.

To explain this config file, you have an initial location directive that has two parts within it. The first says that if the request is for a static file, just serve it up and ignore any further rules. The second says that if it doesn't find a static file, then rewrite it to an index.php based URL, and continue. This leads to the second location directive which processes PHP requests, sending them to the fastcgi processor, which is setup via the SCRIPT_FILENAME setting, as well as the common settings in the included fastcgi_params (which is part of a base Nginx install).

WordPress Install and Testing

Now we can fire everything up on the WordPress server, get it installed (WordPress wise), and make sure it's working, before moving on to setting up the proxying from the other server that handles the domain. The below depends some on how you access your WordPress server directly (e.g. via IP or subdomain, etc.). I was doing it by IP while waiting for the DNS for the blog.example.com part to be working.

Start up the spawn-fcgi, and Nginx daemons:

sudo /etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi start
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start

Proxy/Domain Server Setup

On the server(s) that host your domain, you need to setup the proxying in Nginx to send requests to the /blog path over to your WordPress server. To do that, I added the following to my Nginx configuration:

location /blog {
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
  proxy_redirect false;
  proxy_pass  http://;
  }

Note that you need to insert the IP Address of your WordPress server where indicated (or use the subdomain - I don't have that going yet, as I'm still waiting for my subdomain DNS to percolate through).

WordPress Installer and Config

Now surf over to the WordPress installer at:

http://IP ADDRESS/blog/wp-admin/install.php

This should fire up the WordPress installer and off you go. Now, big caveat here, as this isn't quite how I did it, so I can't say for certain that this install phase will work properly. To diverge for a minute, incase this happens to you, I initially had WordPress installed directly in /var/www/wordpress. I then hit http://IP ADDRESS/wp-admin/install.php, and did the install. Once installed, I went into the "Settings" tab of WordPress's admin area, and changed the site URL and home page URL's to be http://www.example.com/blog. And then, I moved the actual WordPress files from /var/www/wordpress to /var/www/wordpress/blog.

Back to the suspect way to use... You will want to ensure in the Settings panel of the WP admin to set your blog URL's (site URL and homepage) to be http://www.example.com/blog. This is so that WordPress will generate URL's that look like that (instead of looking like one with the IP address in it, or however you originally accessed the installer).

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I am in the process of consolidating my blogs to a single system, and in doing so, am switching to Movable Type. This blog will eventually move, but the initial impetus was for some other blogs that were running on WordPress where I was having some problems (and spent way too much time trying to fix that - one of the key things I don't want to be doing with my blog system). But, in relation, I found the setup instructions for Movable Type a bit lacking, especially in relation to using multiple blogs, and how this works in terms of Apache and MT setup.

I also want to say a bit thanks to Duncan for showing me his Apache config, and some brief discussion of multiple blogs with MT. The MT docs were really lacking here as said, but Duncan's knowledge made it clear this was pretty easy and a nice way to go. Thanks Duncan, and check out his blog and site, and of course all his great pics on Flickr.

I am using a single installation of Movable Type, supporting multiple blogs, with each blog having their own domain name, and that blog (or really the MT content) living at the root of that domain name (this last part isn't required/essentially for this tutorial, you can easily tweak the Apache config).

So, with that, given that it actually turns out to be relatively simple to set up once you know a few key bits, I figured I'd pass along what I did...

First, I created my standard Ubuntu slice at Slicehost. I host everything with them these days, and as such, I have a base system image that I've built for myself. It's built with their standard Ubuntu 7.10 choice, and then I make tweaks to the SSH setup, add a few bits I need, etc. But, I believe you could simply take pretty much a standard Ubuntu server install and use that. Please let me know if this guide doesn't work for you in that case.

Preparations

In preparation for the move, while my existing blogs were running, I exported their data from WordPress using WordPress' Export feature, which produces a WXR file. Save that to my local machine.

I also made sure I had my domain names secured, and the DNS for them setup. In particular, one thing to note is that Movable Type is sort of a two part system. You have the MT web application, which is a publishing application, but is not what someone hits when visiting your blog(s). MT publishes your blog out as static content (or that's the default option anyway). So, I setup an "mt" subdomain on one of my domains where I will access MT (more on that below).

Apache and Perl Install

Apache 2 and mod_perl were not on my system by default, so I needed to install those. This amounts to:

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-perl2 libapache2-mod-perl2-doc

sudo perl -MCPAN -e "install Mail::Sendmail"

Create a Database

I created a database for MT using MySQL. I also setup a specific MySQL user, password, and assigned them rights to that database. You'll need this info later when setting up/configuring MT.

I have been using Navicat for nearly all my DB management. It works really well given it can do SSH tunneling as I don't open the MySQL port on my servers, etc. It is a commercial app, but as a developer who works with DB's often, has proven to be my tool of choice (I've tried many others, and this is the one that's worked best for me).

Apache Configuration

I have a relatively minimal Apache configuration file. The bulk of it is done with a file that sets up my virtual hosts (several domains point to a single machine). The setup for MT has a few critical pieces:

• Setting a ScriptAlias for the "mt" directory, so mod_perl knows to execute .cgi files there.


• Setting an Alias for the "mt-static" directory, which is MT's static content, and which you'll want to be referenced from all your blogs. You can also do this with a symlink, but I've done it with an Apache alias below so that I don't have to worry about a given blog's static content getting wiped out and breaking this (if the static content gets wiped out, you can just republish in MT to restore it, so I prefer to keep that purely maintained by MT).


• Setup the proper options/settings for the MT directory.

Thus, my configuration for my virtual hosts looks like the following (fake domain names used), notes following:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
        ServerAdmin chris@example.com
        ServerName mt.example.net
        DocumentRoot /var/www/mt
        Alias /mt-static /var/www/mt/mt-static
        <Directory /var/www/mt/mt-static>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>
        ScriptAlias / /var/www/mt/
        <Directory /var/www/mt>
                AllowOverride None
                Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *>
        ServerAdmin chris@example.com
        ServerName example.com
        ServerAlias example.com www. example.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/example
        Alias /mt-static /var/www/mt/mt-static
        <Directory /var/www/mt/mt-static>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>
        Redirect /mt.cgi http://mt.example.net/mt.cgi
</VirtualHost>

The first VirtualHost block sets up where I'll access MT, thus at http://mt.example.com. There you will see both the Alias for mt-static, and also the ScriptAlias for mt. These are critical.

The second Virtual Host block defines one of the actual blogs, which will be accessible at http://example.com or http://www.example.com. For additional blogs, you would add another of these blocks per domain name. The key bits here are the DocumentRoot and the Alias for mt-static. The DocumentRoot is where you will have MT publish your static blog content. Make sure that directory is writable by Apache/MT.

Finally, the Redirect sets things up so that when you are logged in and visit your blog, and see the various links for "Edit this content" that those will actually work (they point to mt.cgi, so this redirects them to whatever domain is serving mt).

Setup Movable Type

Next, visit http://mt.example.com/mt.cgi in your browser to begin setting up and configurating Movable Type. It will ask you about your database, and a few other bits, and then prompt you to create the first blog. Make sure the blog URL and directory match what you setup in your Apache configuration above. Beyond this you will need to refer to Movable Type docs for questions. But, you should essentially have a blog running, and will just need to Publish it to have MT write the static files into the directory you've defined.

The last step for me was to import my blog content from my prior WordPress setup, using the WXR dump I created at the beginning of all this. One key note here. When you go into MT's Import page - choose the blog you want to import to (even if you only have one) first. Only then when you pick WXR (if appropriate) for your import will it give you the proper fields for the info it needs for the WXR import. Otherwise it'll set your import type back to MovableType, and claim it has read in your import file fine (but you'll of course have no content).

I'm still tweaking my templates and doing a few bits to the sites I'm moving over, so I'm off to continue on that. Hope this helps someone.

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I am setting up a system at SliceHost, on one of their Ubuntu Dapper slices. First, I'm not as familiar with Ubuntu as I am Fedora, but this is one reason I chose Ubuntu (to get more experience). Anyway, I found several other blog posts and such on the web about this, but none worked perfectly. I glommed mine together by using them though. Here they are:

• Simplistic Complexity
  
• Free Opinion
  
• Urban Puddle
  

And, here's what I did. First, uncomment the universe lines in /etc/apt/sources.list. Then...

# apt-get update# apt-get dist-upgrade
# apt-get install ruby ruby1.8-dev ri rdoc
# ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/local/bin/irb# wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
# tar xvzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
# cd rubygems-0.9.0
# ruby setup.rb
# cd ..
# rm -rf rubygems*
# gem install rails --include-dependencies
# dpkg --purge apache apache2  (this removes Apache if it exists, which it didn't)
# apt-get install build-essential zlib1g-dev
# wget http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/httpd/httpd-2.2.2.tar.gz
# tar xzvf httpd-2.2.2.tar.gz
# cd httpd-2.2.2
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --enable-mods-shared=all --enable-deflate --enable-proxy --enable-proxy-balancer --enable-proxy-http
# make
# make install
# cd ..
# rm -rf httpd*
# apt-get install postfix  (Then, use the "Internet Site" default setting, and picked "WeighPals.com" as the name)
# apt-get install mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev libmysqlclient15off
# apt-get install libmysql-ruby1.8
# gem install daemons gem_plugin mongrel mongrel_cluster --include-dependencies

technorati tags:RubyOnRails, Apache, Ubuntu, Ruby

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