Serving Static Contents with SSI in RAILS Site
Posted by rp8 on Thursday, September 25, 2008

RAILS is perfect for serving dynamic contents but it’s just wasteful for static contents.

In a typical RAILS deployment where Apache is used as front-end and Mongrel cluster as back-end, we can leverage mod-rewrite to avoid sending the requests for static contents to Mongrel.

Here’s an example site:

1. RAILS is deployed in /home/site and DocumentRoot = /home/site/public

2. The static contents are in /home/site/static and don’t forgot to change file mode for SSI.

chmod +x abc.html

Here’s the site conf file (site.conf for Apache2):

<VirtualHost *>
  DocuemntRoot /home/site/public
  ServerName www.site.com
  ServerAlias site.com
  XBitHack on

Alias /static /home/site/static
<Directory /home/site/static>
AllowOverride Options
Options +Includes +ExecCGI -Indexes
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

<Directory /home/site/public>
Options +ExecCGI -Indexes
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

RewriteEngine on

    
	
  1. static contents
    
  RewriteRule ^/static.* $0 [QSA,PT,L]
    2. 



    
	
  1. static index.html for /
    
  RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html [QSA]
    2. 



    
	
  1. cached RAILS pages
    
  RewriteRule ([.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
    2. 



    
	
  1. proxy to mongrel cluster
    
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    
  RewriteRule ^/(.*) balancer://site_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]
    2. 




<Proxy balancer://site_cluster>

  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:5001

  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:5002