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Mephisto Hosting: How to deploy Mephisto on HostingRails.com

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Here is what not to do when installing Mephisto
Don't get mephisto working on your local box then upload the files. It doesn't work.
I didn't upload the whole Mephisto rails app, just followed the tutorials, got the .htaccess and dispatcher.fcgi files right. But for some reason rails wasn't finding gems and plugins in the vendor directory. Tried a whole lot of things to move forward but it didn't work.

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Here is what did work:
At the command line at root:

svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/tags/rel-0.7.3 my_mephisto_app

Most mephisto install examples call '.../mephisto/trunk' but i didn't want the latest, i wanted the latest stable release which according to this page http://www.mephistoblog.com/download is 0.7.3

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Create a database and database user (i did this thru cpanel).
Add the database name, user and password to database.yml and remove everything but 'production'.

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Uncomment this line in \config\environment.rb

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'

no need to change routes.rb

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Freeze rails 1.2.6. This is necessary for Mephisto to install/operate correctly.

rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_1-2-6

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At the commandline in ~/my_mephisto_app create your database tables and data (it copies themes as well). Like this

rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=production

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Update .htaccess in \public by commenting out

# AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

and changing rewrite rule to

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

(both of these changes are from this tutorial )

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Grab a correct dispatch.fcgi:
At the command line from root i ran 'rails sbtest' to create a dummy rails app, copied the dispatch.fcgi file from \sbtest\public to \my_mephisto_app\public

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All done! Browse to your new Mephisto app.

I setup mephisto as an addon domain so i also did the symlinking from this tutorial
http://www.hostingrails.com/forums/wiki_thread/6

and here is the mephisto install i loosely followed
http://mephisto.stikipad.com/help/show/Installing+Mephisto

I didnt freeze rails to edge as mephisto runs on rails 1.2 and rails 1.2 is now out and installed on HostingRails.com accounts.

I hope your mephisto install is hair pulling free :)

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If you are looking for themes, I ported a bunch and can be downloaded from http://railsgrunt.com/mephisto-themes
just download, unzip, and upload the folder to your themes directory. thanks.

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There is a problem with Mephisto comments when combined with Apache. The problem being you can add a maximum of only 1 comment per blog post. The reason is described here.
The solution described is to add

DirectorySlash Off

to the end of your public/.htaccess file.
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