The Joyent Community

At the bottom of http://instiki.org/show/Installation there's a note that, as of 0.11.0, Instiki should be able to run as a FastCGI application. I've gotten it to work under lighttpd and thought I'd share my config here. I'm having a bit of trouble mapping URLs the way I want them, though, and I'm hoping someone else will have some insight into that problem.

Assuming you've got lighttpd already setup, configuring Instiki to run as a FastCGI is fairly simple. Once setup this way you won't have to worry about having a cronjob to keep Instiki running: lighttpd will take care of it for you when it launches. My lighttpd runs on port 8010, and here we'll configure Instiki so it's available from http://example.com:8010/instiki . We can then use Apache to proxy requests from our main site through to lighttpd.

If you're starting from scratch, you'll need to obtain a copy of Instiki and setup its database. Let's grab it from Subversion and put it in a folder called "apps":

mkdir apps
cd apps
svn co http://svn.instiki.org/instiki/trunk instiki

Now to initialize the SQLite database:

cd instiki
RAILS_ENV=production rake migrate

Rails apps generally assume they're running at the root URL. However, we want to get to Instiki via http://example.com:8010/instiki, not http://example.com:8010/ . We'll need to let Instiki know this so that it can generate the correct URLs. Open up config/environment.rb. At the bottom of the file add the following line:

ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = "/instiki"

Now Instiki knows where it lives in the URL namespace.

When configuring lighttpd I prefer to keep the configuration for each app/site in its own file, and then just include these files in the main lighttpd.conf. My lighttpd_instiki.conf looks something like this:

homedir = "/home/YOURUSERNAME"

instiki = homedir + "/apps/instiki"

logdir = homeidr + "/logs"


    
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/instiki" {
  server.document-root = instiki + "/public/"
  server.errorlog = logdir + "/instiki.lighttpd-error.log"

  alias.url = ("/instiki/" => instiki + "/public/" )
  url.rewrite = ( "/$" => "index.html", "([^.]+)$" => "$1.html" )
  server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi" 

  fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
    ( "localhost" =>
        (
          "socket"   => instiki + "lighttpd-fcgi.socket",
          "bin-path" => instiki + "/public/dispatch.fcgi",
          "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" ),
          "min-procs" => 1,
          "max-procs" => 1,
          "idle-timeout" => 60,
        )
    )
  )
 }

Create the configuration file, reload/restart lighttpd, and verify that you can access Instiki directly. You can now create ProxyPass/ProxyPassReverse pairs in Webmin to bring Instiki into your normal URL space.

Here's what I can't figure out, though: I'd like to make a published version of the Wiki (one that doesn't have edit links visible) the default and hide the editable version behind a different URL. Ideally, the published pages would be visible via http://example.com/wiki, and the edit version would be something like http://example.com/wiki/edit. However, by default the published pages are accessible only via http://example.com/wiki/published, and going to /wiki prompts for a password. I can setup a proxy that points http://example.com/wiki to http://example.com:8010/wiki/published, but all of the links have "/wiki/published" in them so even that doesn't work.

I'm almost positive this requires tweaking Instiki's routes.rb, but I can't bend it to my will. Any suggestions?

Last edited by ericpeden (2006-05-22 21:13:50)