Rails in subdirectory of wordpress

I am developing a rails app. the app is not ready so our product manager requires to use wordpress as main page and the application located in subdirectory of wordpress and let uses try the app via wordpress.

Requirement :

Apache with php and passenger.

I am using apache passenger for deploying rails app. Passenger make  Php and Ruby running smoothly in apache web server.

Below is the summary of what I did to make this happened

Create virtualhost

In /etc/apache2/sites-available/ create file call mysite.com (for simplicity mysite.com should be your domain name) containing the following code:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName mysite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
RailsBaseURI /app
RailsBaseURI /playground
RailsBaseURI /staging
</VirtualHost>

Organise your projects directory

In /var/www directory contains 4 directories as below:

• wordpress (root directory for wordpress => mysite.com ).


• app (main rails app  => mysite.com/app ).


• playground (rails app for playground purpose  => mysite.com/playground ).


• staging (rails app for staging purpose =>  mysite.com/staging ).

Create symlink

inside /var/www/wordpress create the symlink to app, playground and staging.

ln -s /var/www/app                    /var/www/wordpress/app
ln -s /var/www/playground     /var/www/wordpress/playground
ln -s /var/www/staging            /var/www/wordpress/staging

The syntax is:

ln -s [target_source] [link]

We need symlink because when we access: http://mysite.com/app

then apache will go look for  [webroot]/app where our webroot we configure to be in    /var/www/wordpress/ so it will look for /var/www/wordpress/app

then the operating system serves /var/www/app instead because /var/www/wordpress/app is linked to /var/www/app

 

In case we enable SEO in wordpress then we need to tell apache to escape wordpress every request url starting with app, playground, staging

in /var/www/wordpress  modify .htaccess file as bellow

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !app*
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !playground*
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !staging*
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

In case if you are working on local machine you need to create hosts. in /etc/ edit hosts file and append the following content to it

192.168.1.100 mysite.com

where :

• 192.168.1.100 is your computer ip. you can check you computer ip with ifconfig command.


• mysite.com is your domain name

Tell apache that you want to enable your virtualhost

run the following command  a2ensite mysite.com

where :

• a2ensite (apache2 enable site ) is the apache utility to enable your virtualhost.


• mysite.com is the filename of virtual host you created previously in /etc/apache2/sites-available

Reload apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

 

Open up your browser and type :

http://mysite.com should be served by wordpress


http://mysite.com/app rails app.

Done !!!