We have liftoff
With the help of my co-worker Alec (whose finger is visible at right), I've managed to get the development of Popratings.com started. Every development project has a first step, and most of them involve the words "Hello, World!".
I'm really terrible at IT-related work so I feared setting up an environment would be painful but it was actually not so bad. I decided to go with Ubuntu Server Version 7 as a development environment. As a user, I'm more comfortable operating in Windows (which I'm not necessarily proud of, but it is a fact) but for programming, I've been working in Linux for the last 5 years so I prefer that.
Since I don't have a spare computer lying around, or space for one, I found a VMWare image at thoughtpolice.co.uk and have set up the environment there. To start working, I installed PHP 5.0, Subversion, and Vim using Aptitude, which was all very easy. I decided to go with Subversion mainly because I don't really know anything about it and I've heard good things. As for Vim, I haven't decided what I'm going to do for an IDE but Vim will suffice in the interim.
For a few different reasons, I want to have a lot of control over the way the URLs look in Popratings. Because of this, I'm using Mod_rewrite inside Apache to map all URLs that aren't images to a front controller, which I call TrafficController.php (although I certainly could have come up with a more useful name, this is my first PHP project in a couple years so I'll learn from my mistakes). In addition to providing his finger for the photo, Alec also gave me the idea to use .htaccess files to route traffic to a front controller class, although I believe you could also do it for an entire site as opposed to a single directory using 000-default in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/. Alec used .htaccess files for a site he worked on a few months ago and said it worked out well.
I also decided to add a sub-directory for Popratings in the default directory that Apache serves files from (/var/www/) so that I can easily support more sites in the future from the same server. I can add directories to this folder as my list of sites grows. To accomplish this as well as the URL rewriting, I followed these steps:
- enable Mod_rewrite by adding a symlink from etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load. The command for that is ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load
- in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default, set the DocumentRoot to /var/www/popratings/ so that Apache knows where to get the files specific to Popratings
- in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default, change /var/www/ to /var/www/popratings/ so that the settings in 000-default are applied to the files specific to Popratings
- in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default change "AllowOverride None" to "AllowOverride all" to allow rewrites
- create a file at /var/www/popratings/.htaccess so that I can control traffic sent to the document root
Then, my .htaccess file looks like this:
Options +FollowSymLinksThere are a couple notes to mention here. One is to make sure that when you add "FollowSymLinks" to Options, if you leave the plus sign out, you'll override the other settings for Options that are defined in 000-default. This is a problem if you're writing PHP (and other non-HTML languages) because you'll get a "Forbidden" error. From what I've read of the documentation, I think it's because the "MultiViews" Option gets overridden, although I may be mistaken. At any rate, using the plus sign in front of FollowSymLinks adds it to the other options rather than overwriting them.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ /home/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.*css
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.*js
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.*jpg
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.*gif
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.*png
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ TrafficController.php?uri=$1
To explain a bit about the rewrite rules and conditions, the first rule states that if there is nothing after "popratings.com" in the request, direct the traffic to /home/. The next conditions take all images and include files out of the scenario and tells everything after "popratings.com" to be added as a parameter to TrafficController.php with the name "uri". Note that this includes cases where a user was just accessing the home page, in which case "/home/" is added as the uri parameter. In other words, the URL continues through the redirect rules even after being altered by one of them. Also note that the list of files to exclude from the rules is probably incomplete; you may want to add .exe, .pdf, and/or .xml, among others. As the list gets longer, you may want to change the regular expression so that it only requires one RewriteCond for all necessary file types.
This information was all available on the web but it was not usually specific to my operating system and was not all in one place, so it took a little work. I'm now ready to get some real work done. Unfortunately after setting up this environment, I sat down to actually do that work last night and realized that while I know a lot of design theory, I've forgotten almost all the PHP practice :-( While the progress may take a little bit of effort to get going, I'm sure it will be like riding a bicycle.
