John Topley’s Weblog

I recently added Shaun Inman’s superb Mint statistics package to my AssetGraphed Rails Machine installation. As the installation wasn’t particularly straightforward, I thought I’d write this little guide for others who may be struggling. I should point out that the real credit for the information here goes to Bradley Taylor from Rails Machine who was extremely helpful and persistent.

First of all, I should point out that these instructions cover installing Mint under your /public directory i.e. yoursite.tld/mint/ rather than the subdomain installation method (mint.yoursite.tld). With that out of the way, here’s what you need to do:

1. Install PHP on your Rails Machine using these instructions. You should have no problems with them if you follow them exactly.
2. Log in to your Rails Machine as your deploy user then become root by using su - root and entering your root password.
3. Edit: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and search for DirectoryIndex index.html. Add index.php to the end if it’s not present as shown below and save the file:

   DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

4. Edit: /etc/httpd/conf/apps/yourapp.conf and add the following immediately after the RewriteEngine On line:

   RewriteRule ^/mint/?$ /mint/index.php [QSA]

5. Now find the three lines shown below:

   # Redirect all non-static requests to cluster
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://yourapp_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

   —And add the following lines immediately before them:

   # Don't redirect requests to /mint
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mint/(.*)$

6. The full rewrite rules should look like this:

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteRule ^/mint/?$ /mint/index.php [QSA]
   
   # Prevent access to .svn directories
   RewriteRule ^(.*/)?\.svn/ - [F,L]
   ErrorDocument 403 "Access Forbidden"
   
   # Check for maintenance file and redirect all requests
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/system/maintenance.html -f
   RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
   RewriteRule ^.*$ /system/maintenance.html [L]
   
   # Rewrite index to check for static
   RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html [QSA]
   
   # Rewrite to check for Rails cached page
   RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
   
   # Don't redirect requests to /mint
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mint/(.*)$
   
   # Redirect all non-static requests to cluster
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://yourapp_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

7. Save the file. It’s probably read-only. If you edited it using vi then you can save it even though it’s read-only by using :wq!
8. Finally, restart Apache by using /sbin/service httpd reload and log out completely from your Rails Machine.

You can now install Mint itself by adding it to your working copy directory under /public and adding it to your Subversion repository using svn add ./public/mint. Once you’ve deployed to your Rails Machine you’ll be able to complete the Mint installation by visiting http://yoursite.tld/mint/ and following the instructions.