Installing Pier on Ubuntu

Installing Pier on Ubuntu Organic Design procedure

Set Up a Pier Image

• 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 also assumes an OD server 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