This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Matt Bauer. Original Post: Rubyforge ViewVC - Now With mod_python Feed Title: blogmmmultiworks Feed URL: http://blog.mmmultiworks.com/feed/rss.xml Feed Description: Thoughts on Ruby, hosting and more Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Matt Bauer Latest Posts From blogmmmultiworks

It was nice to get ViewVC back up and running but I wasn't happy with the performance. I wasn't surprised that it was slow since it was running as a CGI script. The obvious solution was to use mod_python and having some time today that's what I did. Yes, the url still says viewvc.cgi but trust me, it's using mod_python.

Getting mod_python running with Apache is rather easy. In my case it was just:

$ tar zxvf  mod_python-3.3.1.tgz

$ cd mod_python-3.3.1
$ ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs
$ make
$ make install

Next I added the necessary modules to httpd.conf:

LoadModule dav_svn_module     /usr/local/apache2/modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module   /usr/local/apache2/modules/mod_authz_svn.so
LoadModule python_module      /usr/local/apache2/modules/mod_python.so

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerName viewvc.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com

DocumentRoot /u/apps/viewvc/bin/mod_python

<Directory /u/apps/viewvc/bin/mod_python/>
  AddHandler python-program .py
  PythonHandler rubyforge-handler
  PythonDebug Off
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

#RedirectMatch /cgi/viewvc.cgi(.*) /rubyforge-viewvc.py$1

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  ^/cgi/viewvc.cgi*
RewriteRule  ^/cgi/viewvc.cgi(.*)$  /rubyforge-viewvc.py$1  [L]

</VirtualHost>

I then added the ViewVC libs as a python site-package with the following:

$ echo /u/apps/viewvc/lib > /usr/local/lib/python-2.4/site-packages/viewvc.pth

I didn't do any benchmarks to see how much faster mod_python is with ViewVC but it feels a whole lot more responsive. The real test will be when the GoogleBots come crawling.