The Historical Webber

Multiple PHP Instances With One Apache

Long-winded Introduction

It took me a couple of days to figure this out due to lack of decent tutorials and not enough confidence in my Linux skills to build programs from source. I think I have the hang of it now, and write this up with the intent on providing another, or the only, tutorial on setting up CentOS 5 with multiple instances of PHP using one Apache install. That being said, there are a number of good tutorials out there, just none of them explicitly for CentOS and some leave out some details that n00bs like me get confused about.

PHP4 and PHP5 on SuSE 10.1 – This was by far the most helpful of the tutorials. Even though it was written for SuSE, it works almost straight across for CentOS.

There is also a great list of instructions in the comments on the php.net site under installing PHP for Apache 2.0 on Unix systems (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.apache2.php#90478).

I found this one after I wrote up this tutorial at http://cuadradevelopment.com. It’s a bit different, but should work as well.

There are basically two different ways I could have done this. 1- run a single instance of Apache, and run one instance of PHP as a module, and other installs as CGI. 2- run several instances of Apache, each with it’s own instance of PHP as a module. I chose to do the first method for no particular reason. Dreamhost has a post about the good and bad with running PHP as CGI.

So basically, the steps are: 1. Set up Apache and have PHP install as a module. 2. Configure and make another instance of PHP to run as CGI. 3. Add a virtual host to Apache running under a different port to access the PHP as CGI.
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Tags: apache, bash code, CentOS, httpd, LAMP, mysql, php, tutorial

Converting WordPress to static html

UPDATE: Check out the new post on a better way to do this here: http://historicalwebber.mossiso.com/convert-wp-to-static-html-part-2-244.html

Usually people are wanting to convert their static html pages to some dynamic content management system. I’ve run into the issue of needing to go the other way.

A few professors at GMU love to use WordPress for their classes. It’s a really great way to get more student participation and involve some of those who aren’t so talkative in class.

But these blogs are usually only needed for one semester, and then just sit there. This can be a security risk if they are not kept up to date, and is cumbersome when trying to update many of them (one professor had over 30 blogs!).

Sometimes the content should still be viewable, but the need for a whole cms type back-end no longer exists. Sometimes the professor would just like a copy of the pages for their own future research or whatever.

So, I figured out a way to convert a dynamic WordPress site into static html pages.

Here are the basic steps I used:

1. Change the permalink structure in the WordPress admin section. Alternatively, directly in the database change wp_options.permalink_structure.option_value to “/%postname%.html”.
   UPDATE `database`.`prefix_options` SET `option_value` = ‘/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/’ WHERE `prefix_options`.`option_name` = ‘permalink_structure’ LIMIT 1 ;

   UPDATE (2.12.08): Reading a post from Christopher Price (who linked to this post) about WP permalinks, I’m thinking using this structure (/archives/%post_id%.html) might afford the best results. I often found a page that displayed the raw HTML instead of being rendered. This just might fix that issue.

   UPDATE (3.11.08): I did some more dynamic to static conversions today, and found out the best permalink structure to use is just the post name. No extra categories and such. So the best structure to use would be this (/%postname%.html). The benefit is that the every page is unique with a descriptive name for the url (albeit sometime very long), and there are not as many subdirectory issues that arise.

   UPDATE (7.17.09): This time around, I have found that the following seems to work best for permalink:

   /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

   And cleaned up the SQL statement.

2. Add the .htaccess to /path/to/wp/ if not already there (where /path/to/wp/ is from http://somedomain.com/path/to/wp/ ). If there already is a .htaccess file and it is set to have permalinks, then you can probably leave it as it is.
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /path/to/wp/
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule . /path/to/wp/index.php [L]
3. Use wget to copy all of the files as static html files.
   wget –mirror –wait=2 -P blogname-static -nH -np -p -k -E –cut-dirs=3 http://sitename.com/path/to/blog/

   *** Change –cut-dirs to the appropriate number associated with how many directories are after the domain name. The trailing slash plays a part too. ****
   UPDATE (03.11.08): I found that the –cut-dirs doesn’t really do anything this time around.
   UPDATE (7.17.09): This time around, I find the following to work best, even the –cut-dirs.

   wget --mirror -P wpsite-static --cut-dirs=3 -nH -p -k -E https://site.com/path/to/wp/

   This has the bonus of making the directory for you, thus negating the make directory step. Make sure to use two dashes and not an em dash.

4. Copy the contents of wp-content to save uploaded files, themes, etc. This way copies a lot of unnecessary php files, which could be potentially dangerous, but is really easy if you’re just converting to archive. To remove the security threat, just pick and choose the files you need.
   cp -r /path/to/wp/wp-content/* /path/to/static/wp-content/
5. Sometimes the files are created with folders in the archives folder. To fix this run the following three commands in the archive folder to fix that up. To get rid of the feed file in all of the directories:
   rm -f */feed

   To delete all of the now empty direcotries:

   find . -type d -exec rmdir ‘{}’ \;

   To rename the files ###.1 to ###

   rename .1 ” `find . -type f -name “*.1″`

   That’s two single quotes after the first ‘.1′

UPDATE (03.11.08): I have found that the old ‘rename‘ command [rename .1 '' *.1]only works on the current directory. If you want to do a recursive renaming you have to use the ‘find‘ command. The above code has changed to reflect this.
UPDATE (7.14.09): When the rename with find doesn’t work, it’s probably because the post has comments, so there is a folder with the same name as the post’s filename. In this case, just move the file (with the .1 extension) into the folder of the same name, but change the name of the file to index.html

6. move to wp folder. make a backup of database:
   mysqldump -u [userfromwp-config.php] -p –opt databasename > databasename.sql

   UPDATE (03.11.08): I found I needed to backup just a few tables from a database that contained many copies of wordpress. To do this more easily, I used a little script I wrote earlier to dump tables with a common prefix. This could also work if you just put in the full name of only the tables you wanted to backup.

7. move one directory above wp install. make tar backup of old wordpress folder:
   tar -cf wordpress.tar wordpress/
8. rename the old wordpress folder
   mv wordpress wordpress-old
9. move the static copy into place
   mv static/wordpress/ wordpress/
10. test out the site. If it’s totally broke, just delete the wordpress directory and restore the original from the tar file.
11. remove the tar file and wordpress-old directory as needed.

Tags: bash code, Technology, wordpress

Tabledump

I had the need once again to dump only certain tables from a database, instead of all 100+ tables. This was where I had a database with about 5-8 wordpress installs. I wanted to backup all of the tables for only one install. There is a way with mysqldump to do this, by listing out all of the tables you want to dump. So I just wrote a bash script to take care of making the list of tables to dump.

It has an array of database table names (without the common prefix) in the script. Then it prompts for the mysql user, database, and prefix. It could be changed to prompt for a file that contains a list or array of table names.

Anyhow, here it is for anyone’s use:

Tags: bash code, mysql