Comments on: No-Framework Ruby on the Web using eRuby on Mac OS X

By: ralovely » Blog Archive » Getting apache2 to serve eRuby files on MacOSX 10.5

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:34:15 +0000

[...] is mainly maymay.net (if you’re interested in Rails, hivelogic.com is the [...]

By: Rubidot

Rubidot — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:40:05 +0000

Thanks Meitar, it was a problem with MacPorts. I did something funny when I first installed it, so I reinstalled it and everything worked fine.

I put the AddHandler and Action stuff in a .htaccess to better mimic my host, and I ran into the problem Liam was having (I’m on Tiger). Kevin’s suggestion fixed the problem.

Thanks for the great article and helpful comments!

By: Meitar

Meitar — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:11:19 +0000

Rubidot, I'm unsure as to what that error is about. Sounds like a problem with MacPorts, though. Maybe a Google search about it would find something helpful…?

By: Rubidot

Rubidot — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:33:33 +0000

I’m getting stuck at the first step. I input

sudo port install eruby

in the Terminal, and it returns

Waiting for lock on /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_devel_readline/work/.macports.readline.state

and just sits there. I have the latest MacPorts installed.

By: Kevin Ethridge

Kevin Ethridge — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:10:09 +0000

I had the same problem, but I changed:

AllowOverride None
Options None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

To:

AllowOverride None
Options FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

By: Meitar

Meitar — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 07:23:29 +0000

Great, Liam; glad I could help. Seems as though there’s a difference in the default configuration between Apache 2 and Apache 1.3 as delivered on Mac OS X. As soon as I get a Mac OS X 10.5 machine to play with, I’ll have to update this article. Until then, if anyone else knows the specific changes needed to make this work with Apache 2 on Mac OS X 10.5, please let me know.

Oh, and Happy New Years everyone!

By: liam

liam — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 18:47:52 +0000

rm /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/eruby.cgi
cp /opt/local/bin/eruby /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/eruby.cgi

That seemed to solve the problem – obviously it’s a problem with the Apache configuration! Thanks for your help!

By: Meitar

Meitar — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 14:00:20 +0000

That’s funny. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Mac OS X 10.5 system on which to test; I’ve only got this working on Tiger. I would double-check all of your Apache configuration files and make doubly sure that you’re allowing symbolic links. One way to test this is to simply delete the symbolic link to the eruby binary and replace it with a copy of the real binary, like so:

rm /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/eruby.cgi
cp /opt/local/bin/eruby /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/eruby.cgi

Then try again. If this works, you know the problem is your Apache configuration. In that case, comb through your Apache files to make sure there are no includes or other directives overwriting your modifications. One such file that typically does this is /etc/apache2/default-server.conf, so be sure to check that too.

By: liam

liam — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:04:17 +0000

Output seems the same.

liamks$ ls -l /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables
total 24
lrwxr-xr-x 1 liamks admin 20 27 Dec 23:43 eruby.cgi -> /opt/local/bin/eruby
..

I’ve tried a million different combinations with my liamks.conf file… a few with httpd.conf and not luck.

By: Meitar

Meitar — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:47:09 +0000

Hmm. Are you positive both the symbolic link and the eruby binary have the proper UNIX permissions set on them? You should get output similar to the following on your machine when you check:

maymay$ ls -l /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/
total 8
lrwxr-xr-x   1 admin  admin  20 Oct 25 00:32 eruby.cgi -> /opt/local/bin/eruby

Note the first chunk of the third line that indicates the link is world-readable and world-executable. For basic information on UNIX permissions, see this tutorial, for example.

By: liam

liam — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:39:51 +0000

Woops, the bracketed Directory stuff got filtered out. Here’s what each options block corresponds to:

Directory /
Directory “/Library/WebServer/Documents”
Directory “/Users/liamks/Sites/”

By: liam

liam — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:33:35 +0000

Thanks for your quick reply. According to httpd.conf it looks like FollowSymLinks is enabled by default:

# First, we configure the “default” to be a very restrictive set of
# features.
#

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

When I modify the following to include FollowSymLinks (for liamks.conf) the same error persists:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

AddHandler rubypage .erb .rhtml
Action rubypage /cgi-bin/eruby

Once again, I appreciate your help!

By: Meitar

Meitar — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 07:00:38 +0000

Liam, try adding the following line in the appropriate Directory block for your set up:

Options +FollowSymLinks

Or, just make sure “FollowSymLinks” is a listed option in the Directory block for your home user folder. That’s the directive that tells Apache to follow symlinks to their targets. I thought Apple set up Apache that way by default, but maybe I was mistaken about that…?

By: liam

liam — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:28:51 +0000

I’m having the same problem as Daniel (I’m using os x 10.5.1).

I get the following error:
======
You don’t have permission to access /cgi-bin/eruby/~liamks/erubytest.rhtml on this server.
======

according to the error log:
[Fri Dec 28 00:06:25 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/eruby

====
The link should be fine as I copy and pasted “ln -s /opt/local/bin/eruby /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/eruby” into the terminal window. I’ve checked in /opt/local/bin/ and eruby does exists. I’ve checked in /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/ and the eruby shortcut does exist… Not sure what to do on this!

By: Meitar

Meitar — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:11:53 +0000

Hmmm…at first glance it sounds like either Apache isn’t configured to allow access to the CGI binary or to your local Sites directory, or else it’s actually thinking that you’re trying to get to a file called /cgi-bin/eruby/~danieldeverell/test.rhtml. In either case, take a look at the error log to see if anything more helpful appears there. (You might also try raising the verbosity using the LogLevel directive.) If troubleshooting on your own fails, I’ve always found the folks in #apache on Freenode are very helpful.

If you figure it out, I’d love to hear what the problem was, as I’ve yet to use Apache 2 heavily. Thanks.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:09:29 +0000

Interesting article but it didn’t quite work for me in 10.5.

Port installed eruby just fine and I was able to view helloworld.rhtm.

The first issue I encountered was with Apache. 10.5 uses Apache 2 by default and doesn’t migrate Apache 1 settings over so I had to
cp /etc/httpd/users/*.conf /etc/apache2/users/
just to get localhost/~username running again.

The creation of the shortcut (eruby -> /opt/local/bin/eruby ) proceeded without issue and I made the changes to the user-specific conf file but it throws a permissions error:
——-
You don’t have permission to access /cgi-bin/eruby/~danieldeverell/test.rhtml on this server.
——-
when I access http://localhost/~danieldeverell/test.rhtml (after restarting Apache).

Any thoughts?

As an aside – I am able to run .rb files from my cgi-bin
i.e. http://localhost/cgi-bin/simple_cgi.rb