Your Ego's executable—the application index

Right now we're only describing how to do a FastCGI setup on Apache. There will be an installer script for this eventually but for now, you have to do it manually.

Where?

Pick a location for your Ego. For most sites this will be /ego relative to your webserver's root. You can do anything else if you know what you're doing. It can be at your webserver's root or it can be in another dir anywhere in your webserver's paths.

This example would be for a webroot that was in your /home/username/www directory. We'll call our example site: http://foo.bar.com/. From your command line.

cd /home/username/www
mkdir ego
chmod 755 ego
cd ego

Now you are in your /ego dir. If you did this correctly, you can now visit your site at http://foo.bar.com/ego and get a default server message for an empty directory.

Create and open a file called .htaccess. Insert the following.

# FastCGI version
DirectoryIndex index.html ego.fcgi

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  !-s
RewriteRule ^(.*) ego.fcgi/$1  [QSA]

That does a couple of things. First, it makes requests to http://foo.bar.com/ego look for the file index.html before looking for the application's executable ego.fcgi.

Why do that? In case the need arises, you can just put up a quick index.html file to basically turn off your whole site without fear of messing up code.

Second, any request to your site in or above http://foo.bar.com/ego/ will be checked by the RewriteCond.

So if someone asks for http://foo.bar.com/ego/audio/apothecaries-weight.aac, the request filename, audio/apothecaries-weight.aac, will be checked against !-s (it's meaning, no size). If apothecaries-weight.aac doesn't exist (or is entirely empty), the request will be rewritten to ego.fcgi/audio/apothecaries-weight.aac.

Everything after the ego.fcgi/ is sent to Ego as arguments/instructions. The great thing about this setup is that you could really put the file there and Ego would simply ignore it and let Apache serve it normally.

ego.fcgi

From inside /ego still, create and open a file called ego.fcgi. Insert the following.

#!/usr/bin/perl
BEGIN {
    $ENV{CATALYST_ENGINE} = 'FastCGI';
    # provide your own directory for configuration and customized files
    $ENV{EGO_CUSTOM} = undef;
}

use lib qw( /path_to_your/Ego/lib );
use Ego;

Ego->run();

=head1 NAME

Ego ego.fcgi - Ego's application executable file for FastCGI.

=head1 SYNOPSIS

See L<Ego>. http://ego.perlperl.com/ego/admin/manual

=cut

You will need to change at least one thing. The use lib "/path_to_your/Ego/lib" must go to your real Ego installation.

chmod 755 ego.fcgi

If you are ready to customize your site, you should also pick a directory where your custom files will go. This goes in $ENV{EGO_CUSTOM}. It should not be in your webserver's paths. I.e., it should not viewable from a browser. E.g.--

    $ENV{EGO_CUSTOM} = "/home/username/etc/ego_custom";

The directory can be anything you wish. It just should be invisible to your browswer--so it can't be viewed by hackers--and not inside your Ego library--where it would be overwritten the next time you upgrade your Ego install.