Redmine 0.9.0 offers tons of improvements but one among all forced my decision to upgrade without waiting for a final release: Rails 2.3.5. Redmine 0.8.x is built on Rails 2.1.0 and there seems to be some kind of weird Rails-Redmine-Passenger-Ruby EE memory leaks.

With the new release, Redmine has changed the most part of its URLs. The development team basically migrated all routes to a more RESTful-oriented architecture. They did a wonderful job, unfortunately they probably chose the worst way to ensure backward-compatibility: duplication.

All the old routes are still available along with the new ones and this can cause several duplicate content issues. To patch the problem, I configured some Apache redirection rules in order to permanently redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

The gist doesn’t pretend to solve all issues. It’s just a quick and (quite) dirty fix.

From Redmine side, I would have setup a Rails Metal to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones. This is not as efficient as relying on the web server, but this is compatible with any user environment.

Feel free to fork, clone and update the gist. After all, this is a Git repository!

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3. Generic Apache configuration snippets

The most annoying activity, each time I have to configure a clean Linux installation, is to deal with all the small tweak and improvements I applied since the server was originally created. I have more than one server and I like to reuse successful scripts in order to save time and leverage productivity. I often end up improving one script at time and I need the changes to propagate to all the other existing servers.

For this reason, I started to keep track of all those configurations in several different Git repositories. Each time a script is updated, the changes are pushed to the main repository. All the servers are configured to periodically pull changes from the master repository to keep local versions up-to-date.

Because cloning private repositories is almost annoying as copying content by hand, I decided to convert some of my Git repositories into a Gist. Here’s my Generic Apache configuration snippet repository. It contains some generic configuration snippets for various topics, from Rails to security.

How to use the snippet repository

All the Apache configurations in the repository are self-contained. It means, each configuration is created to be independent from the hostname or other configurations, to make it more flexible and reusable.

To apply a configuration, just Include the file in your Apache or Vhost configuration.

You can even enable the configuration in a single vhost.

Depending on your needs, you might want to clone the Git repository on your local machine and selectively include the configuration snippets or just grab the configuration you need for your single virtual host.

Snippets

Apache Gzip Compression

The following snippet enables the Gzip compression for everything except compressed images. Gzipping your content usually reduces the response size by about 70%. Do you want to learn more? Watch how Gzip compression works and why it’s so important.

Rails Cache

The following two snippets are meant to be used in combination with Rails page caching. They instruct Apache to look for a cached resource in the /cache folder and serve the content from the directory if the file exists.

Redirect Not-WWW to WWW

This is a really generic Not-WWW to WWW configuration script. Unlike most existing scripts, it doesn’t force you to manually inject the server name. Just include the snippets and you’re ready. If you are looking for a less exotic configuration, have a look at the How to 301 redirect Not-WWW to WWW version question at Search Marketing Arena.

Security Rules

In the attempt to reduce the amount of spam comments sent to my blogs, I extracted some recurrent patterns from my server logs and created some super-simple rules to kick out automated script. Basically, this is the same idea behind mod_security, with the (huge) difference my set of rules it much more simple but much more lightweight.

All configuration snippets are available free of charge and without any warranty. Use them at your own risk.

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3. Apache Log Regex: a lightweight Ruby Apache log parser

ApacheLogRegex is designed to be a simple Ruby class to parse Apache log files. It takes an Apache logging format and generates a regular expression which is used to parse a line from a log file and returns a Hash with keys corresponding to the fields defined in the log format.

Take for example the following Apache log entry.

You can easily parse it with Apache Log Regex and extract only the information you need.

If you want more control over the parser you can use the parse! method. It raises a ParseError exception if given line doesn’t match the log format.

Instead of spending time parsing one line at once you can read entire log files and feed the parser collecting the final result.

Apache Log Regex is a Ruby port of Peter Hickman’s Apache::LogRegex 1.4 Perl module, available at http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/~peterhi/Apache-LogRegex.

You can install the library via RubyGems.

Feel free to email me with any questions or feedback. For the documentation and more details you can visit the ApacheLogRegex project page.

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qsappend|QSA’ (query string append)
This flag forces the rewrite engine to append a query string part of the substitution string to the existing string, instead of replacing it. Use this when you want to add more data to the query string via a rewrite rule.

Let’s try to redirect a page depending on its query string. Our rewrite rule should looks like this:

According to the official documentation, you would expect the following behavior:

However, if you don’t append something new, then the original query is passed through the rules unchanged by default.

If you want to discard the original query string you must append an empty question mark at the end of the rule. Let’s call it the query string not append or query string discard flag.

Here’s a quick reference for dealing with query string in a RewriteRule.

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3. Generic Apache configuration snippets

You can easily identify the client IP address, the request timestamp, the landing page and the referral, in this example represented by a Google Search Page.

Creating a custom referer log file

As a Marketer or SEO, the referral and the landing page can be really useful information. Extracting them from the default apache log file can be a little tricky and requires some parsing knowledge. For this reason you would find more convenient to write a custom log file including only those two details.

Let me show you how. You don’t need to know much about Apache server management but you must have access to your virtual host configuration because the CustomLog and LogFormat directives can’t be specified in the .htaccess file but only at server config or virtual host level.
Write the following lines either in you Apache configuration file or in your virtual host definition depending on whether you want to create a referer log for all configured websites or just for a single virtual host.

In order to monitor incoming links you need to define a custom log format using the LogFormat directive and give it an useful name, for example referer.

Then ask Apache to generate a new log passing the custom format.

You can specify as many CustomLog as you want, already configured logs will not be affected. In this case Apache will generate two logs for each request: the first one with the default format and the second one including only the referral string and the landing page.

Here’s an example of a typical virtual host configuration.

For each request to example.com Apache will write an entry in the referer.log file including the landing page and the referer string, like the following one.

Combining LogFormat and CustomLog in a single line

If you don’t need to define a reusable LogFormat and you don’t care to assign it to a format name, you can create a custom log in one step.

The line above is equivalent to the following one.

Writing a CSV log file

You can customize the referer log placing as many “%” directives as you wish in your log format. For example, the following format writes a CSV log file.

Here’s an example.

Log entries can be easily parsed or opened with a CSV-compatible software like OpenOffice or Excel.

Logging external referers

Logging all referrals is expensive and not so effective for marketing analysis. It would probably be a good idea to restrict the directive to match only external referers. Enviroment Variables are what we need to do this.

First we set an environment variable called INTERNAL_REFERRAL if the request comes with a referer string matching current website domain. Then we define the LogFormat as usual and we enable the CustomLog only if the environment variable is empty, thus if the request matches an external referral.

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If you need to mass-redirect a group of pages you would probably need to use the RedirectMatch directive.

This will redirect any page from the oldfolder to the corresponding one in newfolder with a convenient one-by-one redirect.

Unfortunately, either Redirect nor RedirectMatch allow you to specify a query string for the redirect source. It other words, the following statements are invalid and they will simply be ignored.

The solution requires to change the focus from mod_alias to mod_rewrite. Here’s an example.

Let me explain the solution for those who wants to learn and not only to copy.

The first line enables the RewriteEngine module. Please note that mod_rewrite Apache module must be installed and enabled in order to use the RewriteEngine.

The RewriteCond statements set all the rewrite conditions. The forth line, the real rewrite directive, will be executed if and only if all conditions are satisfied by the current request.

First I want to check the request is for the page I need to redirect. Skipping this condition might cause some unexpected behavior if other pages in my website are using the id parameter. Then I want to base the rewrite rule on the value for the current request query string. Be sure to wrap the id value within a regular expression match to be able to reuse the match later as a back-reference.

Finally I can write my redirection rule. This line looks like a RedirectMatch statement. First I specify the pattern for the redirection source, then the redirection target. As you can see, the value for the id parameter captured by the last RewriteCond is referenced in the target with the %N keyword.

The comma separated values at the end of the RewriteRule line define which flags should be applied for this rule. I want to setup a 302 Redirection and be sure Apache won’t execute any other rule after this one.

PS. If you suffer from “write-as-less-as-possible” sickness you might want to change the original rewrite statement with

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This extension creates the following Capistrano tasks under the passenger namespace:

1. start
2. stop
3. restart

Additionally, it overwrites the default Capistrano deploy:start/stop/restart tasks to fully integrate Passenger into your current deployment strategy.

Please note that, due to Passenger architecture, only restart task is supported. start and stop task are available only for compatibility purpose. Invoking deploy:start or deploy:stop will simply return a warning.

The most recent version of this recipe is available as a Gist (#3102).

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