Configure Apache + Passenger to serve static files from different directory
- by Rory Fitzpatrick
I'm trying to setup Apache and Passenger to serve a Rails app. However, I also need it to serve static files from a directory other than /public and give precedence to these static files over anything in the Rails app.
The Rails app is in /home/user/apps/testapp and the static files in /home/user/public_html. For various reasons the static files cannot simply be moved to the Rails public folder. Also note that the root http://domain.com/ should be served by the index.html file in the public_html folder.
Here is the config I'm using:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.com
DocumentRoot /home/user/apps/testapp/public
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond /home/user/public_html/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond /home/user/public_html/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /home/user/public_html/$1 [L]
</VirtualHost>
This serves the Rails application fine but gives 404 for any static content from public_html. I have also tried a configuration that uses DocumentRoot /home/user/public_html but this doesn't serve the Rails app at all, presumably because Passenger doesn't know to process the request.
Interestingly, if I change the conditions to !-f and !-d and the rewrite rule to redirecto to another domain, it works as expected (e.g. http://domain.com/doesnt_exist gets redirected to http://otherdomain.com/doesnt_exist)
How can I configure Apache to serve static files like this, but allow all other requests to continue to Passenger?
