Best practice for white-labeling a static web site? - linux

I have a directory structure with files under directory 'web', which represents a white-label web site (html files, images, js etc.).
I also have some twenty different 'brands' let's call them 'web-1', 'web-2' etc. each containing specific files that should override the files in 'web' for a specific brand.
Apache is configured to find the files for each virtual site i in document root 'website-i'.
In order for each 'website-i' to contain content like 'web' with the overrides for brand 'web-i', my build script first copies all of 'web' to 'website-i' and then overrides it with the source files from 'web-i'.
There several problems with this approach:
It takes time to copy the files.
It takes a lot of disk space
Adding a new brand requires adding to the script.
Is there a best practice for doing this in a way that does not require duplicating files?
(with Apache and Linux)

Well, the best solution is with pretty simple server-side code but I'm going to assume you've already rejected that, maybe because you haven't permission to run code on the server (although if your hacking the config then you probably do).
A solution just in config could be to make it serve from the default root but rewrite the url if the file exists in the proper dir ...
RewriteCond /web-1/a_file -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /web/$1
But you'd have to do this for every file in every brand. You might be able to be more clever about it if the files are stored in a dir that's the same as the hostname but that's getting too complex for me.
Seriously, server-side code is the way to go on this...
Strangely enough, a work colleague was in pretty much exactly the same situation a couple of weeks ago and he eventually rewrote it as PHP. Each site is a row in a database, one page which pulls out the changed text and urls for images, etc. and falls back to a default if there's nothing there.
Having said all that. Using links, as you say above, solves problem 2, probably much of 1 and I don't think there's a way around 3 any way.

Related

How do I serve MathJax from a local Happstack server?

I'm not a developer/programmer. I'm just someone trying to use Gitit to take notes. I've got it to the point where it runs on Windows, but the math looks best using MathJax. I don't want to rely on a remote CDN to get the MathJax working (power cuts and internet disconnections are very frequent here). The author of the app mentions it can be setup in "4 lines of code" in Happstack:
mathjax-script: https://d3eoax9i5htok0.cloudfront.net/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML
# specifies the path to MathJax rendering script.
# You might want to use your own MathJax script to render formulas without
# Internet connection or if you want to use some special LaTeX packages.
# Note: path specified there cannot be an absolute path to a script on your hdd,
# instead you should run your (local if you wish) HTTP server which will
# serve the MathJax.js script. You can easily (in four lines of code) serve
# MathJax.js using http://happstack.com/docs/crashcourse/FileServing.html
# Do not forget the "http://" prefix (e.g. http://localhost:1234/MathJax.js)
The link to the tutorial is broken, so I'd be grateful for some assistance. Is there is any MathJax configuration I need to change, or simply extracting the files will do? I'll be writing lots of math in gitit. I'd prefer not to set up Apache etc. to serve MathJax. Gitit already uses Happstack, I'd prefer using that. Thanks!
EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not sure how to assign the port 1234 to serve this script
Ok I got MathJax working using portable Apache and the MathJax archive downloaded from docs.mathjax.org. The URL needs to be of the form (assuming you extracted the files into apache2/htdocs/MathJax):
http://localhost/MathJax/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML
I wanted to keep this lightweight by reusing the same instance of Happstack as Gitit, but that seems beyond my skills/available time right now.
EDIT: Just found out that ghc will pack everything into one exe when building. So I doubt it is even possible to use the same Happstack instance, as the root directory of the server doesn't exist?
From the documentation, the static directory should work just fine:
On receiving a request, gitit always looks first in the static
directory (or in whatever directory is specified for static-dir in the
configuration file). If a file corresponding to the request is found
there, it is served immediately. If the file is not found in static,
gitit next looks in the static subdirectory of gitit's data file
($CABALDIR/share/gitit-x.y.z/data). This is where default css, images,
and javascripts are stored. If the file is not found there either,
gitit treats the request as a request for a wiki page or wiki command.
So, you can throw anything you want to be served statically (for
example, a robots.txt file or favicon.ico) in the static directory.
You can override any of gitit's default css, javascript, or image
files by putting a file with the same relative path in static. Note
that gitit has a default robots.txt file that excludes all URLs
beginning with /_.
(source: https://github.com/jgm/gitit)
Download the MathJax.js file from e.g. cdn.mathjax.org and place it in data/static/js/MathJax.js. Then change the config you quote to:
mathjax-script: http://localhost:5001/js/MathJax.js

Google tells do not change dynamic URLs, and offers this instead, how?

If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site.
What they mean exactly? And how to do it?
Your question: What do they mean exactly?
If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site - static refers to html pages that are not dynamically created.
you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. Have 'hard copies' of your pages with the different alternatives
One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. Go through your site and create static html pages (or pdf's) of each one and store them in the file structure that is represented by the URL.
Example of the last:
http://site.tld/product/pear which today is a dynamic (created on the fly by the code and database) but is not really in an actual folder on the server called product. They are suggesting to create a copy of the dynamically created page and store it in an actual folder on the server called product with the name pear.
Your question And how to do it?
Will that work - sort of if you wanted to by adding a .html to the physical file (copy of the dynamic one) and save it but I suspect you will run into all sorts of difficulties that you will need to overcome with the redirect code in places like .htaccess. Another option may be change the domain part of the URL to include static ie http://static.site.tld/ for the static copies and the original URL as is for the dynamic version.
The other big challenge then becomes maintaining the two copies because the concept they talk about is for the content (what is shown in the browser) to remain static over time. Kind of breaks the whole concept of how we build dynamic web sites today e.g. online shops etc.
For example if it's a shop, I would use PHP to also create the physical file when a product is added and not include parts that are going to change, rather include a link to the dynamic info something like:
<?php
$file = 'product/pear.html';
// mysql code here to extract the info and format ready for writing
$content = "<html><head><title>$title_from_db</title></head><body>$page_content_from_db</body></html>";
// Write the contents to the file
file_put_contents($file, $content);
?>

What does .sprite file refers to?

I'm using Liferay Portal 6, The .sprite file is not specified in the source code, however, it's included in the URL with a slash dot, then it's blocked by a security program.
When I delete those file in theme/docroot/images and I deploy the project, they are generated again.
I would like to know how to manage those files or rename them?
You can open those files: It's combined images - look up "CSS Sprite" for a thorough documentation. They're used to limit the number of requests that go back to the server. Without sprites, you'd have every theme image loaded individually. With them you only need the sprite once, resulting in a significant performance boost: You want to have as few http-requests per page as possible, and sprites are one automatically handled way to help you achieving this.

How to use .htaccess to reformat a directory listing while including the directory name?

For directory listings, I've created a common .htaccess file as well as a common header ("HeaderName /header.html).
Everything works fine, except one thing: while I don't want the derpy h1 version of "Index of /blah", I'd like to display a customized (and normal-sized) version of that, e.g., "CurDir = /blah". By default, specifying the HeaderName replaces all of that with some static text.
I tried embedding a bit of PHP (getcwd()) but that just returned the root directory where the header.html lives, no matter what subtree was being displayed. Surely there's some way to access the CWD without having to sprinkle control files like this in each subfolder?
I stumbled upon what may be a suitable environment variable while looking at the phpinfo() output... but is there a better (more common) way people handle this, perhaps without even using PHP?
<?php
$dir = getenv("REQUEST_URI");
?>

Is it possible to use virtual paths / subfolders registering scripts in Orchard Themes?

I'm trying to build a new Orchard theme, and to keep things structures I'd like to put script includes in separate folders (this particular script include needs quite a bit of files so to put all of them in the root of the scripts folder doesn't seem so great).
Basicly I can't wrap my head around this:
Script.Require("~/ThemesFolderEtc/Scripts/libs/shadowbox/shadowbox.js");
it seems only possible to do something like this:
Script.Require("shadowbox.js");
Does anyone have any pointers on what virtual path to use, and if it's supported to use virtual paths?
I believe Script.Require is key/value dictionary of registered scripts. Try Script.Include("path"). This is what I do with my css file. I point it to a file on in public dropbox folder which makes changing the css super easy and no ftp!

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