Part 6b: mod_proxy and Lenya

The live environment, at least for this setup, is remarkably similar. Since we're using the same Apache instance but a different IP address, just setup another NameVirtualHost directive with the new IP address. We'll assume that for every publication in Lenya, that will be a directory under our domain name. So, say we have the following publications in our pubs directory:

                default -> Default Publication 
                weblog -> Lenya Weblog

Then we want to access them this way:

                http://www.client.com/default/ 
                http://www.client.com/weblog/

In the end, our setup for the live server should look like this:

 
                NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.200:80
                
                <VirtualHost 192.168.1.200:80> 
                    ServerName www.client.com
                    ServerAlias www
                    ProxyRequests Off 
                    RewriteEngine On
                    RewriteLog logs/www.client.com.rewrite.log 
                    RewriteLogLevel 0
                    RewriteRule ^/([^/\.]+)$ $1/ [R] 
                    RewriteRule ^/([^/\.]+)/$ $1/index.html [R] 
                    RewriteRule ^/([^/\.]+)/live/(.*)$ $1/$2 [R,L]

                    # Rewrite for Lenya-wide resources (e.g. 404 page) 
                    RewriteRule ^/lenya/(.*) http://www.client.com:8080/lenya/$1 [P]
                    RewriteRule ^/([^/\.]+)/(.*) http://www.client.com:8080/$1/live/$2 [P] 
                    ProxyPassReverse / http://www.client.com:8080/
                </VirtualHost>
                
                <VirtualHost 192.168.1.200:443> 
                    ServerName www.client.com
                    ServerAlias www
                    ProxyRequests Off 
                    RewriteEngine On
                    RewriteLog logs/ssl.www.client.com.rewrite.log
                    RewriteLogLevel 0
                    RewriteRule ^/([^/\.]+)$ $1/ [R] 
                    RewriteRule ^/([^/\.]+)/$ $1/index.html [R] 
                    RewriteRule ^/([^/\.]+)/live/(.*)$ $1/$2 [R,L]
                
                    # Rewrite for Lenya-wide resources (e.g. 404 page) 
                    RewriteRule ^/lenya/(.*) http://www.client.com:8080/lenya/$1 [P]
                    RewriteRule ^/([^/\.]+)/(.*) http://%{SERVER_NAME}:8080/$1/live/$2 [P]
                    ProxyPassReverse / http://www.client.com:8080/
                </VirtualHost>
            

So, what's going on here? Well, to use the non-SSL virtualhost as an example, we're simply matching for any directory and mapping it to it's live counterpart. We add the rewrite for the 404 page (remember, this installation is under the ROOT context, so some of the "lenya" directories are missing) and then reverse proxy it to port 8080 as usual. Now, if you go to http://www.client.com/default/, you get taken to the live site for the default publication.

There are some things that aren't good about this. For one, it doesn't take into account the root directory (i.e., http://www.client.com/). It will be served by Apache in the DocumentRoot instead of through Lenya. That may be what you're looking for, but my guess is that your publications won't directly match to their URLs. No problems - just be more specific. If you wanted to map the http://www.client.com/ URL to the default publication, then just use this instead:

 
                RewriteRule ^/$ index.html [R] 
                RewriteRule ^/default/live/(.*)$ $1 [R,L] 
                RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.client.com:8080/default/live/$1 [P]
            

Then reverse proxy as always. In configurations we've used, we just list each publication we have that maps to a URL, so we know for certain that we are matching everything we want to.

There's one last thing that you'll want to do, and that's modifying the default proxy settings in the publication's files itself so that you can switch between SSL and non-SSL encrypted pages with ease. The start of the HowToModProxy document, as mentioned before, shows how to do this really well. Using the example above where the publications relate to their web address:

            <proxy url="https://www.client.com/default" ssl="true" area="live"/>
            <proxy url="http://www.client.com/default" ssl="false" area="live"/>
            <proxy url="https://lenya.client.com/default" ssl="true" area="authoring"/>
            <proxy url="http://lenya.client.com/default" ssl="false" area="authoring"/>
        

WARNING! we haven't tried the above configuration because we don't have the necessary resources to test it properly. Hopefully someone will test it and get back to us on the results. According to the documentation on Lenya's website, it should be correct.

Well, that's it. There's obviously more that you can play with when it comes to mod_proxy and general URLs, but we hope this is a springboard for more ideas and a place to gather more resources on the subject. If you're ever stuck on mod_proxy in general, you can visit Apache's documentation on the subject, and as always, a post to the Lenya user mailing list will most likely yield some answers.