Linking Rails App and Wordpress Blog on different hosts

Question

I have setup my Rails app on a VPS and a WordPress blog on GoDaddy. I did this because I don't want to have to install PHP on my VPS. Also, my rails app is using Postgres and while I am aware that WordPress can be setup to use Postgres, I just don't want to go through the hassle.

How do I link the blog and my rails app, such that the blog is located at:

www.mysite.com/blog

Also, when internally navigating on the blog, the base URL should remain www.mysite.com/blog

For example:

www.mysite.com/blog/article1

www.mysite.com/blog/category

And so on....

Answer 1

Assuming that your Rails site runs with an Apache in front, here is something you can put into the VirtualHost part of your Rails site:

<Location /blog>
  ProxyPass http://godaddy.com/yourwordpress-site/
</Location>

In Nginx it would look like this

location /blog {
  proxy_pass http://godaddy.com/yourwordpress-site;
}

Of course I would recommend, that you add some more options to the proxy setup so that the IP address of the original requester is kept etc. Doing it this way, the Webserver already catches the request and doesn't even bother your Rails app with requests that it doesn't really know about.

Answer 2

to redirect correctly, but not hide the url of the wordpress site

in your rails app's routes.rb

match "/blog" => redirect("http://YOUR_WORDPRESS_BLOG_SITE_URL")

Make sure you didn't forget to add http/https in your redirection url