No pain no gain

Mercurial is a so called DRCS (Distributed Revision Control System). I have been using Subversion for a couple of years, both at work and for my own projects. Now I thought it was about time to try something different.

But first, why do I want to switch from SVN to Mercurial? Basically the most appealing argument for me was the fact, that with Mercurial I am able to work offline with my repository. Besides that, I always had issues with the way SVN was handling tags and branches. Especially merging changes from a branch back into the trunk was always a pain. I did not need to use that functionality often but when I did, I always ended up doing it twice, because I could not remember which way to do it right.

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If you are using Nginx with a configuration that is directly serving php pages via FastCGI, you need to adapt the rewrite rules to Nginx. In the case of the CMS-system SilverStripe this is not really straight forward. The original rewrite definition in the .htaccess file looks like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.gif)|(\.jpg)|(\.png)|(\.css)|(\.js)|(\.php)$
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule .* sapphire/main.php?url=%1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
</IfModule>

So every file which does not end in .gif, .jpg, .png, .css, .js and .php and where the file does not exist will be rewritten.

I chose a somehow stripped down version of these rules which looks in Nginx notation like this:

if (!-f $request_filename) {
    rewrite ^/(.*?)(\?|$)(.*)$ /sapphire/main.php?url=$1&$3 last;
}

If a requested file is not found, the rewriting engine will parse the request string for all elements before a ‘?’. This substring will be pasted as the url parameter to main.php. Everything after ‘?’ will be added as additional parameters. This rewrite rule seems to be working and I haven’t encountered any problems so far.

While Apache is a great server for delivering dynamic content and especially hosting PHP-based websites, it has a high memory footprint and a high overhead when forking new worker processes during high server load. In this article I will describe how you can use the nginx web server as a reverse proxy for your Apache to deliver static files instead of Apache. Nginx has a very small memory footprint and can deliver static files lightning fast.

The idea behind this setup is that nginx will listen on port 80 for incoming connections, identify whether the client requests a static file or a dynamic webpage. In case of a static file it will deliver the file itself. In case of a dynamic request it will forward that request to the Apache server.

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