Rails - Apr 2005 - .htaccess and routes.rb

Hello,

I''m trying to iron out some issues with a Rails app that is deployed in
a subdirectory, i.e. http://www.blah.com/railsapp/. My scenario is 
pretty well illustrated by this page on the wiki:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/HowtoDeployRailsAppUnderDirectory

I read somewhere that routes.rb is intended to provide functionality to 
replace Apache rewrite rules in the .htaccess file, but there are two 
things that I can''t figure out how to do without using Apache rewrites:

1) When the user requests www.blah.com/railsapp/, Apache needs to see 
the request as www.blah.com/railsapp/public/ instead. In most of the 
rails tutorials, this is accomplished in httpd.conf by configuring the 
application as its own virtual host with ''public'' as the root 
directory. But when you aren''t creating a new vhost, what do people 
consider to be the cleanest way to get the requester into the
''public''
directory?

2) Next, when Apache processes the request for 
www.blah.com/railsapp/public, how does it know to process the dispatch 
file?

My understanding is that routes.rb does not enter the picture until the 
dispatch file is being processed. And so I''m assuming that it cannot 
entirely replace Apache rewriting (to get to the dispatch in the first 
place), but I''d love to hear ideas or suggestions for a better way to 
do this.

Thanks for any input,
Jay

On 4/15/05, Jay Cotton
<jay-6EdP6e0zQ2yM4n7jyz/RagC/G2K4zDHf@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> In most of the
> rails tutorials, this is accomplished in httpd.conf by configuring the
> application as its own virtual host with ''public'' as the
root
> directory. But when you aren''t creating a new vhost, what do
people
> consider to be the cleanest way to get the requester into the
''public''
> directory?
I store the rails app directory somewhere else entirely from the web
root, and point to the public directory with a link.  eg:

My personal web root is at ~/public_html, and I have a separate
directory ~/apps where I store the Rails directory.  So
~/apps/railsapp is the rails application.

So in public_html, I just ln -s ../apps/railsapp/public railsapp.

In Rails 0.11.1 at least dispatching and routes and everything seems
to work without any changes with this setup.

-dave