It took a bit of poking around today, but I was able to build a test web site on my MacBook. The key turned out to be faulty file and directory permissions throughout the directory tree. That and some Apache server configurations got in my way. Once I got past those hurdles, it was smooth sailing.

One of the tricky parts is that I am configuring the directory tree using .htaccess files. Now, I have total control over my MacBook and the main Apache server configuration file, but I don’t have access to it on DreamHost, my web services provider. Therefore, I need to build/test the proper configurations as if I didn’t have complete machine access. However, I did have to tweak a couple of the primary configurations. First off, I needed to build, install and load the mod_ruby plugin. DreamHost does this currently. The other was that I needed to AllowOverrides for my ~user web site, which is where I’m building the site. The out-of-box configuration had set this to None, which completely ignored my .htaccess files. Again, DreamHost sets this to All or somesuch, so this is something I could do w/o affecting the viability of my testbed.

Now that I’m back to where I was before buying the MacBook, I can forge ahead with development. Minus the Windows headaches.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Hackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.