WordPress Under Rails

Last Updated on June 12, 2020 by admin

There have been occasional discussions about integrating a WordPress CMS into a Rails application. One approach is to simply do a WordPress install under RAILS_ROOT/public/blog. That’s pretty straightforward:


cd RAILS_ROOT/public
mkdir blog
cd blog
svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.4 .


Then do the usual WordPress setup ritual.

If you’re running Phusion Passenger, you need to tell Passenger to ignore the WordPress stuff:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/public
    RailsEnv development
    RailsBaseURI /RailsApp1
    RailsBaseURI /RailsApp2
    RailsBaseURI /RailsApp3
    ErrorLog /var/log/localhost-error_log
    PassengerPoolIdleTime 0
    <Directory /var/www/public/RailsApp1/blog>
       AllowOverride All
       PassengerEnabled off
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I did this setup last night, and now my Rails app has a built-in, full-featured blog. The down side to this approach is that you now have yukky PHP code “polluting” your Rails directory structure, and it also implies that you have a lot of control over your Apache server. I can live with that, at least for purposes of experimentation.

The next task will be to integrate the Rails login authentication with the WordPress blog. There is allegedly a WordPress API to do this, but does it understand the authlogic gem? We shall see…