Linden LAN » Apache

Make Rails Play Nice With FLVPlayback Skin

Brian — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 08:11:02 +0000

Flash assets like an FLVPlayback skin will typically be located in your public folder. However, according to http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/608/608abffd.html, “in a loading scenario, the skin SWF for the FLVPlayback component must be relative to the loading HTML file containing the parent SWF on the server, not to the location of the loaded SWF.” This is bad, since when you load a page, the URL will typically be /:controller/:action, which means the FLVPlayback skin URL will be /:controller/myskin.swf even if your parent SWF is in /public. You can verify this in Firebug on the Net tab. The problem will manifest itself with a loaded Flash movie with no controls. You can fix this by creating a rewrite rule in your .htaccess file.

RewriteRule ^.*/myskin.swf$ /pathto/myskin.swf

Any request ending in myskin.swf will be redirected to /pathto/myskin.swf under the public folder.

Use .htaccess To Password Protect All But The Index File

Brian — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:14:14 +0000

I helped deploy a Magento store today, but the client did not have all the products entered in the database, and won’t be ready to launch that part of the site for another month. So they wanted a “Coming Soon!” splash page to be at the subdirectory where the store is and password protect everything else. To do that I had to reconfigure the .htaccess file.

First I needed to chage the default index file. That’s simple. Change…

DirectoryIndex index.php

to…

DirectoryIndex index.html

Next I needed to password protect the site. That accomplished by using htpassword to setup the users and groups, followed by adding the following directives to the end of the .htaccess file.

AuthType Basic
AuthName "protected area"
AuthUserFile /home/68571/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /home/68571/.htgroup
Require group group
Require user username

That will password protect everything. Finally, I need to allow the index.html file for the splash page.


  Allow from all
  Satisfy any

The first regex will match against “subdir/”, the second regex matches “subdir”, and the third matches “subdir/index.html”. That’s it.

No PHP For You!

Brian — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:56:49 +0000

On Ubuntu 8.10, I ran into a bit of problem. The Apache web server was working fine, but the following commands:

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

failed to work after creating a phpinfo.php file in the /var/www/ root folder. Firefox complained, “You have chosen to open phpinfo.php which is a: PHP file.” Apache was not using the PHP preprocessor for some reason. A bunch of forum posts and blogs said to edit either /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or /etc/apache2/apache2.conf in order to associate the PHP mime type with the file extension. That wouldn’t work because I had also installed phpmyadmin which has an apache.conf file that already has an AddType directive. So, after some digging around, it turns out the module wasn’t even being loaded, even though that’s what you’d expect the package manager to handle when you tell it to install the module. Any how, to fix the problem, just create symbolic links to the php5.load and php5.conf files in the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ folder.

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Update: Debian-based installs of Apache2 have some handy command line utils for managing the web server. So to enable a mod, which automates the above, do this instead:

sudo a2enmod php5

a2dismod is the command for disabling a mod. For sites, there is also a2ensite and a2dissite.