I expect next few weeks to consume almost two days of my time in a single day every day. It’s just that there are too many things to be done… Work Deadlines, College Diploma Examinations, College Project which is to be completed best before last week of March… The time is just running out of me… This, however, makes me feel worse, that I could not even post a little “Hello” post even on the second anniversary of this web-site …

14th Feb 2007, I officially registered JaguarNac.com and It’s up there ever since. Something that I essentially started to know and experiment more about web hosting, servers and any cool new stuff that I can get my hands on.

Through these two years, there’s only one post that actually takes the cake so far and brings visits to my site. I like that post, it’s about URL routing in PHP with Apache. Something I experimented with a while back, trying to learn MVC with PHP and how to get all the requests routed through a single file.  Here’s that post : Apache, URL Routing and Aliases. Apart from this and FoxPro Notes, Google analytics says that there’s nothing much you’d want to see here…

14th February , the registration date, is not a mere coincidence … I just had nothing interesting to do on that day. yet, I celebrate this anniversary date for my web site by throwing a nice little party to my friends as if it’s my own birthday. I don’t know why I do that or what comes on JaguarNac.com till next Feb 14, but till then… Have fun

~Nac

I’m enjoyed the PHPCamp. The camp organized at Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd. was attended by over two hundred interested intellectuals. Nice event, nice ppl.

There were sessions about OpenSocial API, Shindig, Joomla-Shindig integration and OpenSocial apps. Nice lunch, followed by the talks about various tools that enhance PHP development efficiency, Server Scalability, Various common vulnerabilities, Web Application Security and Cross Site Scripting issues. There were few more sessions at 4th floor, however I stuck to the sessions on 7th floor.

Pretty smooth registration process, got a nice registration kit

OpenSocial and Shindig were two interesting things that I was unaware of till today. Am gonna get my hands into shindig soon nuff. OpenSocial are also promising stuff. Build it for one Social Networking Portal that adheres to OpenSocial Specifications, and it will run on all the other portals that do so. Atleast thats what I could get from the entire talks.

Pre lunch sessions mostly focussed on OpenSocial stuff. They also had a session to explain the process of integrating Shindig and Joomla together.

Web application security presentation by Bipin Upadhyay was the most happening thing of the day. This guy actually demonstrated a few running examples of how things break from cross-site scripting, SQL injections and nasty javascripts.

Overall, good stuff.

~Nac

Apache rewrite module uses regular expressions to match string patterns >_<

The link below talks about URL routing in PHP. It’s a three part series which tells about a basic .htaccess file that facilitates the URL routing and gives some php codes and classes to interpret the URLs and have them handled by appropriate controllers.

http://www.phpaddiction.com/tags/category/url-routing/

Now, here comes some interesting information to make the same thing work for “Aliases” in apache. I’m using apache on windows XP so, things here will talk only about apache on window. Same may work for other systems, but, I am not sure about that. (you may want to browse for documentations/help files/tutorials to enable and use mod_alias and mod_rewrite. I wont be writing much about them frankly because I don’t know much about them…)

Alias

By default, apache processes and serves the files from it’s documentRoot directory. It’s like a default directory for the web files to be served by the server.

So, when a URL is like www.somesite.com/meow/meow1.php, and my documentRoot is D:/apache/htdocs , Apache will serve D:/apache/htdocs/meow/meow1.php file by default.

However, when our meow directory does not fall under the documentRoot, that’s when we need to use aliases. Using aliases, we can have apache serve files from location other than documentRoot.

Suppose, my “meow” directory is located at “l:\apps” and i want to serve files from that directory for all “/meow” links to my site, i can add a line n httpd.conf to get this done.

Alias /meow l:/apps/meow

This creates an alias for /meow. Now, instead of documentroot, apache comes to l:/apps/meow for all www.somesite.com/meow links.

now apache also needs a <Directory > directive to define various options and access policies for “l:/apps/meow” directory.

<Directory “l:/apps/meow”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

This block allows access to “l:/apps/meow” and also facilitates .htaccess file in the directory to manipulate all available settings for the directory. You need to place the .htaccess from “URL Routing with PHP” part one in that directory.

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
# Turn on the RewriteEngine
RewriteEngine On
# Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php

Now, when you try out the first part here, everything does not work perfect…. Apache says “Bad Request” (400)

“The Problem”

Everything till here goes file, except for one thing.
The .htaccess would have worked perfect if your meow was in documentroot.

When a request like www.somesite.com/meow/abc/pqr/xyz is handled, the .htaccess in “l:/apps/meow” comes into action.

Alias takes the request to l:/meow/abc/pqr/xyz .
Provided that none of the directories in url exist beyond /meow, Apache rewrites the URL .
it takes the /abc/pqr/xyz part out and puts index.php in the place. So, request goes to l:/meow/index.php

But… that is not what we exactly want.

when, instead of alias, the meow exists under document root, (say d:/apache/htdocs), the similar request gets processed in a slightly different manner.

The request is taken to d:/apache/htdocs/meow/abc/pqr/zyx
it takes the /abc/pqr/xyz part out and puts index.php in the place. So, request goes to d:/apache/htdocs/meow/index.php
now, as d:/apache/htdocs is documentRoot, apache reduces the url to /meow/index.php only.

In case of aliases, the last step does not occur.

The Solution

In order to take the request to /meow/index.php instead of l:/apps/meow/index.php, we need to add “rewriteBase /meow” to our .htaccess file (without quotes”. This directive tells apache about the base URL from which, relative URLs can be constructed. So, the new .htaccess looks like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
# Turn on the RewriteEngine
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /meow
# Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php

Once the rewriteBase is in place, URL www.somesite.com/meow/abc/pqr/xyz gets properly routed to www.somesite.com/meow/index.php. Thus, making us feel Happy ^^

That’s it for the aliases, apache and htaccess. It took some browsing, log tracking and afternoon hours to get things right with aliases. I’m not sure about complete correctness of the above process, this is how it worked for me. If you find any flaw or wish to make any addition/suggestion, please do so, It’s most welcome

~JaguarNac

With my current provider however, i am able to easily manipulate the necessary records for my domain which means i can easily configure subdomains now. For now, the only configured subdomain is mail which allows me to check my mails on mail.jaguarnac.com.

Following article helps while configuring subdomains with Apache…

http://content.websitegear.com/article/subdomain_setup.htm

Sweet!!!

~JaguarNac~