Running Lisp Webservers under Apache
January 23, 2005, at 06:06 PM
I wrote up a short piece on how to configure Apache to use a Lisp webserver for specific files and directories, using mod_proxy and mod_rewrite. As I say therein:
There are several webservers implemented entirely in Lisp. You may be excited about the prospect of using them. But, if you've tried using them for part of a large site, you may have realized that Apache does certain things better, and it would be nice if you could somehow use Lisp for only part of the site. Or, you may be advocating that Lisp be used for a part of your corporate website, but the company understandably does not want to redo the entire site to use a Lisp server. Perhaps it's just easier to sell people on the idea of Lisp if it fits in with other things instead of trying to replace everything.
I would be remiss if I did not make note of mod_lisp, which has similar goals; but my approach requires no additional software, just Apache and your Lisp webserver. Also, it's questionable whether mod_lisp adds anything.
If anyone tries this, I'd love to hear from you. How did it work? What are you using it for? Anything I could have clarified and didn't?
Comments
If you get the Lisp web server to send appropriate Last-Modified and Expires headers, you can even have Apache cache the pages it generates, thus reducing the load on your backend server if pages change less often than they're requested. And as you suspect, it works just as well for translating HTTPS to HTTP (obviously there are security implications if the HTTP connection to the Lisp server is not over a trusted network) so you can do SSL pages "from Lisp" this way too.
I do all my Araneida sites like this.
Posted by: Anonymous | November 6, 2005 02:17 PM
Sweet. That's good to know.
Posted by: Dan Knapp | November 6, 2005 04:24 PM
I got this to work under windows, but am having trouble with apache permissions using mod_proxy... it works fine without the proxy.
Posted by: Naveen | January 7, 2007 11:37 PM