fastcgi + eruby

[J. D.]

What is the best way to handle .rhtml (eruby) documents using fastcgi?

I'm using Linux, Apache2 and fcgi 0.8.4.

I'm trying to convert a site from mod_ruby to fastcgi so I can run some
comparison tests.

Converting .rbx was easy but I'm not sure how to best handle .rhtml.

 

[Patrick May]

What is the best way to handle .rhtml (eruby) documents using fastcgi?

I'm using Linux, Apache2 and fcgi 0.8.4.

I'm trying to convert a site from mod_ruby to fastcgi so I can run
some comparison tests.

Converting .rbx was easy but I'm not sure how to best handle .rhtml.

Maybe use the erb interpreter, and use fcgi instead of cgi? I think
that might work, but at the expense of having to insert a big loop into
all your rhtml templates. There's a cool continuation hack that matz
wrote to make cgi work with fcgi, without any code changes. But there
are some ruby bugs that affect continuations.

~ patrick

 

[Ara.T.Howard]

Maybe use the erb interpreter, and use fcgi instead of cgi? I think
that might work, but at the expense of having to insert a big loop into
all your rhtml templates. There's a cool continuation hack that matz
wrote to make cgi work with fcgi, without any code changes. But there
are some ruby bugs that affect continuations.

~ patrick

fastcgi works as a cgi out of the box without any code changes or
continuations? are you referring to something else, or the method used by
fcgi?

kind regards.

-a
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[J. D.]

Maybe use the erb interpreter, and use fcgi instead of cgi? I think
that might work, but at the expense of having to insert a big loop into
all your rhtml templates. There's a cool continuation hack that matz
wrote to make cgi work with fcgi, without any code changes. But there
are some ruby bugs that affect continuations.

~ patrick

Thanks, you're right about erb!

Googling 'erb' instead of 'eruby' resulted in finding this:

http://pub.cozmixng.org/~the-rwiki/rw-cgi.rb?cmd=view;name=ERbMemo.en

The part about 'using as a library' on the page was particularly
helpful. I guess I can just include it inside the fcgi loop.

 

[Brian Candler]

What is the best way to handle .rhtml (eruby) documents using fastcgi?

I'm using Linux, Apache2 and fcgi 0.8.4.

I'm trying to convert a site from mod_ruby to fastcgi so I can run some
comparison tests.

Converting .rbx was easy but I'm not sure how to best handle .rhtml.

Tricky, because it's a different way of working.

If you change each .rhtml page into a separate fcgi script, then you will
have a separate persistent process for every page, which you probably don't
want if there are hundreds of pages.

You can write a simple fcgi program which reads a filename from the URL,
fetches and compiles the appropriate page (or gets it from a cache) and runs
it: e.g.

http://www.example.com/fcgi-bin/view/foo.rhtml

But then your URLs change. You could use mod_rewrite to chomp your URLs into
the appropriate new format though. Or you might be able to use "Action
handler-name" in the appropriate Directory / Location section.

I wouldn't just do it for the fun of it, or for making speed comparisons
(almost certainly the speed will be the same or slightly slower than
mod_ruby, since you're still doing the eruby work in Ruby, and you have the
extra overhead of communicating with a separate worker process rather than
the Apache httpd process running the Ruby itself)

I'd suggest you only do it if you're moving to an environment where
mod_fastcgi is available but mod_ruby isn't.

Cheers,

Brian.

 

[Michael Neumann]

Maybe use the erb interpreter, and use fcgi instead of cgi? I think
that might work, but at the expense of having to insert a big loop into
all your rhtml templates. There's a cool continuation hack that matz
wrote to make cgi work with fcgi, without any code changes. But there
are some ruby bugs that affect continuations.

Is this still true? I did some tests with the newest ruby-stable, and it
seems that these problems are gone. Can anybody confirm?

Regards,

Michael

 

[Patrick May]

Hi,

fastcgi works as a cgi out of the box without any code changes or
continuations? are you referring to something else, or the method
used by
fcgi?

The best case for continuations I have seen is demonstrated by Matz in
[ruby-talk:13428]

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/13428

It's quite a cool trick -- no each_request loop. I did experience a
few bugs in the combination of callcc and at_exit on darwin. I hope
they are fixed in the latest stable branch, because I think this is the
coolest.

Cheers,

Patrick