autoinstallers should support vhosts

[andersk]

Most of our autoinstallers, in particular Wordpress, break when accessed from a URL that they weren't originally installed at. We should fix them.

[price]

This is blocking #17, which is blocking fame, fortune, and blissful relaxation.

[price]

By which I mean that #17 is impeding #3, which I just noticed is a ticket.

[price]

r725 fixes this for WordPress? as far as #17 requires: the installed blog works from locker.scripts.mit.edu/addrend (the Right Thing URI) and from scripts.mit.edu/~locker/addrend (the old-style URI).

The old-style URI gives a redirect to the longer locker.scripts.mit.edu/~locker/addrend, which is ugly, but the Right Thing URI works without a redirect.

Are there any other autoinstallers known not to work out of the box at the Right Thing URIs?

[ezyang]

The process of testing various autoinstalls on different URLs is relatively easy to do, and would be a good introductory bug for new users.

[mitchb]

While testing autoinstallers for good behavior wouldn't be too hard for the case of scripts/~locker/foo versus locker.scripts/foo, there are some catches here:

1) The scope of this issue has expanded some. It's no longer the case that

supporting the two types of URLs above is enough; we now also want to support arbitrary URLs that users end up with by requesting vhosts from us. It's not possible (yet... until scripts-pony happens) for someone without LDAP admin bits to reassign vhost addresses repeatedly to test that case.

2) WordPress? is known to still be a huge problem in multiple ways. [725] actually

breaks some things. Because it is not truly a URL, which is what that field is supposed to contain, it causes things like XMLRPC clients to be given an incorrect URL that doesn't work (we handled an RT ticket about this recently). And additionally, regardless of the fact that you can get at the front page of the blog from any address, and see links that take you to an uglier address, you cannot log into the admin interface of our autoinstalls at locker.scripts.mit.edu/blog/wp-admin. You get a login page that keeps returning you to it with no helpful error message if you don't instead use scripts.mit.edu/~locker/blog/wp-admin.

Many (most?) pieces of web software these days at least optionally detect and continue to use whatever URL you reached them from. I guess collecting a list of which of ours will cope with all three types of URLs might be helpful.

[ezyang]

Agreed. Such a list will let us size up what types of changes will need to be made. It's quite likely we will end up patching Wordpress to fix this.

[incenate]

Installed mediawiki, wordpress, joomla, e107, gallery2, phpBB, and Advanced Guest Book, and attempt each from both urls. Wordpress and Gallery2 were the two that had major problems with redirection, as logging in on the scripts.mit.edu/username address takes you to the username.scripts.mit.edu address. The others seemed to work in a logically consistent manner.

[adehnert]

By and large, this works. The elephant in the room here is WordPress?, which works far from ideally, but that's being traced as #204 now.