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Sun, 07 Sep 2008

/Linux/Debian: Running a Blosxom Site on Both Desktop and Server

The goal, obviously, is to edit the site locally on my desktop where everything is very fast and convenient, and then periodically sync with the copy of my site on the server. This also has the advantage of automatically enforcing backups.

Of course, one needs Apache installed on the desktop to see what is going on with the site as you edit. I started by installing the (Debian) libapache2-mod-fastcgi and libapache2-mod-perl2 modules. Then copied my whole blosxom site into a sub-directory of ~/public_html.

Then, when I pointed my browser at the blosxom directory, all it would do would display the blosxom.cgi script without executing it. If I executed the script from the command line, ie "./blosxom.cgi", it would actually generate the home page html nicely. So there was clearly something wrong with the Apache configuration.

As it turns out, Debian installs Apache with cgi scripts restricted to one system directory. Apache refuses to execute them anywhere else, like in /home, for instance. The Apache website[1] turned out to be the best source for a solution. I added the following code:

<Directory /home/*/public_html>
     Options +ExecCGI
     AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
</Directory>

to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default, and it was fixed! Onto the next problem....

The path to my blosxom site is different on my desktop and on my server, which gives me problems in a couple of different places.

The easy one is the link to my CSS style sheet in head.html. I made this link absolute to the copy on my server, ie.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://blog.langex.net/bloxsom/2c-lc-static-layout.css">

So now both copies of the site pull the style sheet off the server.

Slightly harder are the several paths hard-coded into blosxom.cgi. To work around this, I settled for two versions of the script. I use unison-gtk[2] to synchronize between desktop and server, so that after forking the two copies of the file I just tell unison to "ignore" the difference in the future (ie. it does not sync that file). Furthermore, to ensure the server copy gets backed up, I hard linked it to another file name, ie.

ln blosxom.cgi blosxom.cgi.server

which unison then dutifully keeps a copy of on my desktop.

I have some hard-coded menu links in head.html that now just work on the server, not on the desktop, but I consider that to be a minor issue....

[1] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/cgi.html
[2] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

posted at: 15:48 | path: /Linux/Debian | permanent link to this entry

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Sun, 07 Sep 2008