mod_proxy – Running TG2 behind Apache

status:Draft

By running your TurboGears2 application behind Apache you can take advantage of Apache’s HTTPS abilities or have it serve your static files.

Using Apache as a Reverse Proxy

TurboGears configuration

If you’re mounting your TG2 app at the root of the website, there’s nothing you need to do. But if you’re mounting it somewhere else, you need to edit deployment.ini to include these changes:

[app:main]
use = egg:your_project_name
filter-with = proxy-prefix
# Usual options here

[filter:proxy-prefix]
use = egg:PasteDeploy#prefix
prefix = /wherever_your app_is mounted

basically this just tells paster where your app is going to be mounted so that it can manage the URL’s for you properly.

Warning:You will also want to make sure that you disable the debugger middleware.

Make sure you have this line in deployment.ini

full_stack = False

Apache Configuration

Here is how to configure Apache 2 as a reverse proxy for your TurboGears2 application.

In Apache’s httpd.conf uncomment the mod_proxy modules:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule proxy_balancer_module modules/mod_proxy_balancer.so

Also note, depending on your distribution, you first might need to install the apache-mod_proxy packages.

In the virtual hosts section of the httpd.conf file or in the include file for your virtual host (e.g. httpd-vhosts.conf, but make sure this is loaded), you would want to have something like this for your site (adapt the server name, admin, log locations etc.):

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName mytgapp.blabla.com
    ServerAdmin here-your-name@blabla.com
    #DocumentRoot /srv/www/vhosts/mytgapp
    Errorlog /var/log/apache2/mytgapp-error_log
    Customlog /var/log/apache2/mytgapp-access_log common
    UseCanonicalName Off
    ServerSignature Off
    AddDefaultCharset utf-8
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPass /error/ !
    ProxyPass /icons/ !
    ProxyPass /favicon.ico !
    #ProxyPass /static/ !
    ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
</VirtualHost>

Uncomment the DocumentRoot and ProxyPass /static/ lines if you want to serve the directory with static content of your TurboGears application directly by Apache. You will then also need to copy or link this directory to the configured DocumentRoot directory.

Check that your Apache configuration has no problems:

apachectl -S

or:

apachectl configtest

If everything is ok, run:

apachectl start

Finally, go to your TurboGears project directory and in a console run:

python start-myproject.py prod.cfg

Now you should be able to see your webpage in full TurboGears glory at the address configured as ServerName above.

To be able to relocate your application without problems, make sure you create your URLs properly (see `1.0/GettingStarted/URLs`_).

Setting the Correct Charset

The default Kid templates used by TurboGears specify utf-8 as a charset. The Apache default charset, returned in the Content-Type header, is ISO-8859-1. This inconsistency will cause errors during validation and incorrect rendering of some characters on the client. Therefore we used the AddDefaultCharset utf-8 directive above to override the Apache default in the TurboGears virtual host section.

You can also explicitly set the charset property on a by-method basis by sending the Content-type HTTP header from CherryPy. To do this, you would add the following line to your controller methods in controllers.py, somewhere before you return the data dictionary:

cherrypy.response.headerMap["Content-Type"] += ";charset=utf-8"

Apache notices the pre-existing header and passes it through.

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