Using Passenger with dynamic mass virtual hosting/userdirs

Question

I already have an apache webserver set up, and it is working for PHP.

It has no static VirtualHosts set up, and dynamically routes all requests.

A request for http://example.com/ would be served from the document root /var/www/example.com (VirtualDocumentRoot), and a request for http://example.com/~user/ would be served from the document root /home/user/public_html (mod_userdir). The latter works no matter what the domain.

I would like to be able to serve Ruby on Rails applications, from the root of a document root, or from a subdirectory, using Phusion Passenger. However, it requires me to add some lines to the <VirtualHost> directive, which obviously isn't there.

I would prefer a solution that does not require root to deploy an application, but this is not critical. I also do not mind a solution that does not use Passenger, if I have the same ease of deployment.

Answer 1

Simple solution is to write a location module in mod_perl that dynamically updates the virtualhost environment (not the container) on a per-request basis. That's how we handled 404s for sites that weren't set up prior to the client logging in via ftp.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem possible. Passenger is completely incompatible with userdirs, and with VirtualDocumentRoot, a separate VirtualHost is required.