Installing Pier on Ubuntu

Legacy: This article describes a concept that has been superseded in the course of ongoing development on the Organic Design wiki. Please do not develop this any further or base work on this concept, this is only useful for a historic record of work done. You may find a link to the currently used concept or function in this article, if not you can contact the author to find out what has taken the place of this legacy item.

Set Up a Pier Image

Pier is a content management system based on the Seaside web application framework. While some static aspects of the site can be farmed across to apache2, the section below refers to situations where the Pier image does file hosting as well as dynamic content:

• Download Pier-2.0-OneClick.zip from http://www.piercms.com/download
• Unzip into any directory, but probably /var/www/domains/Pier.app for an OD install
• As root, change ownership to www-data:

chown -R www-data:www-data Pier.app

• Edit /etc/rc.local and add the following BASH script just before exit 0 (note you will need to change paths if you unzipped into a directory other than /var/www/domains)

#!/bin/bash
# settings
USER="www-data"
VM="/var/www/domains/Pier.app/Contents/Linux/squeakvm"
VM_PARAMS="-mmap 256m -vm-sound-null -vm-display-null"
IMAGE="/var/www/domains/Pier.app/Contents/Resources/Pier.image"
# start the vm
exec \
setuidgid "$USER" \
"$VM" $VM_PARAMS "$IMAGE"

• Restart
• Navigate to http://organicdesign.co.nz:8080
• Alternatively or when testing, to start Pier manually, as root:

cd /var/www/domains/Pier.app ./Pier.sh

Serve Pier Content Alongside Apache

This section is based on an OD Apache2 server configuration is being used, but the principle applies to any Apache2 server.

In the simple image configuration, requests for the pier site need to be forwarded to the correct port and served with the image's own server, not Apache2. Natively, that port is 8080:

• Add pier.organicdesign.co.nz to /etc/hosts
• As root, enable proxy:

a2enmod proxy proxy_http

• Then edit /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.conf, by adding Allow from organicdesign.co.nz as below:

<IfModule mod_proxy.c>

# If you want to use apache2 as a forward proxy, uncomment the
# 'ProxyRequests On' line and the <Proxy *> block below.
# WARNING: Be careful to restrict access inside the <Proxy *> block.
# Open proxy servers are dangerous both to your network and to the
# Internet at large.
#
# If you only want to use apache2 as a reverse proxy/gateway in
# front of some web application server, you DON'T need
# 'ProxyRequests On'.

<Proxy *>
        AddDefaultCharset off
        Order deny,allow
#        Deny from all
#        Allow from .example.com
        Allow from organicdesign.co.nz
</Proxy>

# Enable/disable the handling of HTTP/1.1 "Via:" headers.
# ("Full" adds the server version; "Block" removes all outgoing Via: headers)
# Set to one of: Off | On | Full | Block
ProxyVia On

</IfModule>

• Finally add, at the top of the mod_rewrite in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default, directly under RewriteEngine On:

ProxyPreserveHost On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^pier\.organicdesign.co.nz
RewriteRule (.*) http://organicdesign.co.nz:8080/$1 [P,L]

References

• Dynamic Web Development with Seaside
• Deploy Smalltalk Applications with Seaside