[IPOL discuss] running the demo server behind a reverse proxy

[Nicolas Limare]

Hi,

> I'm assisting an author from my lab in the development of his
> demo, this is the second time I'm doing this here in Montevideo. As
> far as I know, we still lack ssh access to a development server

Yes, I'm late. I've been busy recently writing the first article
*about* IPOL (soon available, I'll let you know). Now the next task in
my todolist is the availability of this demo/developemnt server for
everyone. Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to focus on work lately
in Japan (don't worry, I'm not exposed).

> The problem is (there's always a problem, right?) that this server
> runs behind a reverse proxy.

No problem with proxies, the ipol demos on http://demotest.ipol.im are
behind a reverse proxy (nginx) and the "official ones" on
http://www.ipol.im/pub/demo/ are behind two chained proxies (apache
mod_proxy and nginx). And I recommend to use a proxy when the demo
system is exposed on the web because it will act as a secutity filter
and handle the load.

> So far so god, I made it work, except from some links that are
> generated in an absolute way by the demo code. The problem arises
> because in class app we have the following code:
> http.refresh(self.base_url + 'run?key=%s' % self.key)
> 
> the value of the self.base_url  seems to be taken from the demo.conf
> value of server.socket_host which in my case is server.socket_host =
> 'rosaluna.fing.edu.uy'

server.socket_host and server.socket_port only indicate which network
IP and port the demo should listen on. To customize the URLs when
behind a proxy, remove your "fast hacks" and add these settings:

    tools.proxy.on = True
    tools.proxy.base = 'ihttp://ie.fing.edu.uy/ipol/'
    tools.proxy.local = ''

More doc on the cherrypy site:
    http://www.cherrypy.org/wiki/BuiltinTools#tools.proxy

It should fix all your problems. Let me know if there are some other
problems.
The only abslolute links will be the ones at the top of the page (ipol
...). There should be a possibility to customize this part of the
templates, but I didn't feel this required immediate work. Feel free
to propose your solutions.

> What I would like is just to run a local copy of the server, if you
> could point me to another solution (like running ipol in my home
> directory on the main server) it would be appreciated.

This is not possible. the demo system doesn't provide some files that
can be distributed by another server (a la ~/public_html/), it is a
software that can be used as a stand-alone web server (directly on
line or behind a proxy), or plugged in another web service system
(CGI, fastCGI, WSGI, ...).

Best,

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE - CMLA - ENS Cachan    http://www.cmla.ens-cachan.fr/~limare/
IPOL - image processing on line                          http://www.ipol.im/
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