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I’ve just configured Rails to run in a subfolder on a client’s website. Ran into a few issues, that are worth documenting:

In this configuration, you can visit the Rails site by visiting something like http://www.hostname.com/coolsite/

1. There is a Rails bug (ticket 10913) that effects links to assets. I have a link to our combined stylesheets defined as:

<br /> <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'reset-fonts',<br /> ‘base-min’,<br /> ‘calendar_date_select_silver’,<br /> ‘application’,<br /> ‘header’,<br /> ‘tables’,<br /> ‘form’, :media => “all”, :cache => ‘coolsite’ %><br />

The bug is that Rails looks for all of your stylesheets in /public/coolsite/stylesheets/*.css, where ‘coolsite’ is the name of your subdirectory. Obviously, it should not be including the ‘coolsite’ folder in the path.

The workaround I use, is to create a soft link after capistrano deploys the code to our production server. I added this to my /config/deploy.rb file.

<br /> # Work around for bug http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/10913<br /> desc “Create Apache prefix link”<br /> task :create_apache_prefix_link do<br /> run “ln -s #{release_path}/public #{release_path}/public/#{apache_prefix}”<br /> end</p> <p>after “deploy:update”, “create_apache_prefix_link”<br />

Now, whenever you do a cap:deploy, a soft link will be created in your public software, and this will allow Rails to resolve the stylesheet (and other asses files) in the faulty path. When the ticket is fixed, just remove the capistrano task.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 1:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.