rubyonrailsin

Chris,

I would also love to see some of the details behind how you implemented this. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am working on building a service that would compete with your small business web site service[1]. And from my casual browsing, it looks like I am not the only one[2][3]. I won't hold it against you (nor do I think that anyone else will) if you decide to keep the details of your implementation closed to the public. 

Jim,

I still have to prove out my concept using the tools that I have mentioned. I would prefer to have at least a working proof of concept before adding anything to the wiki. But when I am at that stage, I will be sure to put something up there. Right now, I am leaning towards building a separate project to house this functionality. I think this is more in line with radiant's "no fluff" design goal, and I think that multi-site capabilities will be useful to more than just radiant users.

-Scott

[1]: http://sbmsuite.com/products/make-a-free-website

[2]: http://radiantmachine.com/

[3]: http://radiantcmshosting.com/

On Mar 16, 2010, at 9:39 PM, Jim Gay wrote:

I'd love to see this on the wiki if either of you have time to drop it in there.

On Mar 16, 2010, at 5:02 PM, Chris Rankin wrote:

Much of this functionality, I'm already doing with my application SBMSuite.com which is built using Radiant.

When I create a site it's initially a subdomain of sbmsuite like scott.sbmsuite.com, but you can change that to scott.com whenever you want. I'm using apache+passenger to handle all request and it's all running of a single instance of Radiant. And I just use custom "roles" in my application to enable/disable extension per user. 

It works pretty good for me. Is that what your trying to do?

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 4:56 PM, M. Scott Ford <scott@vaderpi.com> wrote:

Hello all,

Ugh. I am doing it again, but more reading has lead to more information. It looks like pancake[1] and proxy_stack[2] provide even more of what we would need.

One of the features that I would like to see in a multi-site implementation is the ability to allow users to use their own domains. proxy_stack provides the perfect way to do this. Let me present an example.

Let's assume that we use warden for authentication and the Rack::Session::Cookie middleware will be used for keeping track of sessions. So we'd create a pancake configuration that looks like this: (source[3]).

Pancake.stack(:session).use(Rack::Session::Cookie)
Pancake.stack(:auth).use(Warden::Manager) do |manager|
 manager.failure_app = FailStack
 manager.default_strategies = :password
end

And then we have two client sites installed in a "/sites" root, and each root points to a full radiant installation with a different set of extensions for each client. The configuration for that would look something like this. (Warning: I have not run this code.)

SiteStack < Pancake::Stack
SiteStack.router do |r|
 r.add("/sites/:client") do |env|
   require "sites/#{env['usher.params'][:client]/config/environment"
   r.use Rails::Rack::LogTailer
   r.use Rails::Rack::Static
   ActionController::Dispatcher.new
 end
end

Okay. That is all great, but how do we send "www.customer.com" to "www.host.com/sites/customer". Based on my reading, it looks like we can create a config.ru for each customer, and tell the rack-enabled webserver to serve up that rack config whenever a request is received for "www.customer.com". With apache+passenger you would create a "VirtualHost" with a "ServerName" set to "www.customer.com" and with a "DocumentRoot" that points to the public folder below the directory where the config.ru is located "/var/www/clients/customer/public". That config.ru file will look something like this. (I have not tested this either!)

class ::ClientProxy < ProxyStack
 configuration.proxy_domain = "www.host.com"
 configuration.proxy_port = 80

 before_proxy do
   client_name = "customer"
   # prepend "/sites/customer" to the request path before
   # it is forwarded to "www.host.com"
   request.path = "/sites/customer/#{request.path}"
 end
end

run ProxyStack.stackup

Does that make sense?

Thanks,
-Scott

[1]: http://github.com/hassox/pancake
[2]: http://github.com/hassox/proxy_stack
[3]: https://gist.github.com/542e8b01412fe4a682bc#file_my_stack_middleware_example.rb

On Tuesday, March 16, 2010 2:57pm, "M. Scott Ford" <scott@vaderpi.com> said:

> Hello again,
>
> I hate responding to myself, but it looks like warden[1] and url_mount[2] would be
> a good starting point for this, especially if radiant can be modified to rely on
> rails_warden[3] for authentication. We just need to write a rack application that
> uses warden and url_mount to handle "sites" or child rack applications.
>
> [1]: http://github.com/hassox/warden
> [2]: http://github.com/hassox/url_mount
> [3]: http://github.com/hassox/rails_warden
>
> Thanks,
> -Scott
>
> On Tuesday, March 16, 2010 1:58pm, "M. Scott Ford" <scott@vaderpi.com> said:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I thought I would introduce a wild idea I had this morning while thinking about
>> multi-site implementations. One reason that I have not tried to use any of the
>> existing multi-site extensions is I want to have really fine grained control
>> over
>> the gems and radiant extensions that are loaded for each site. (If there is a
>> way
>> to control this with the existing multi-site extensions, then please let me know
>> how.)
>>
>> Radiant itself already handles controlling the extensions and gems loaded during
>> startup. What if we added another layer to that logic, and created an extension
>> that knows how to do the same thing but for site? So basically, Radiant core
>> would
>> just load the multi-site extension, and then every site would be what we now
>> consider a Radiant instance. (If that makes any sense.)
>>
>> Another way to imagine this is to think about the multi-site functionality
>> becoming the parent of Radiant core, instead of trying to fit a multi-site
>> extension inside of Radiant (either directly in core or through extensions).
>>
>> I am not all that familiar with the core code-base, yet, so I am not sure if
>> this
>> is possible, but I thought I would pontificate and see what others think.
>>
>> Now that I have typed all of that out, though. It is starting to sound to me
>> like
>> these features might be best implemented as a rack middleware that Radiant can
>> play nicely with. The middleware would own just sites and users, but radiant
>> would
>> own pages, layout, snippets, etc...
>>
>> I imagine that this would be useful to others in the Ruby community (if it has
>> not
>> already been done), and it would make it possible to have some sites that run
>> rails apps, like radiant, others that are simple sinatra apps, and others that
>> are
>> instances of any other rack-based web solution.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>> -Scott

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