Web applications

Introduction

All accounts include regular web hosting, which is suitable for static content, PHP (WordPress, Joomla, etc.), and CGI/FastCGI. For those wishing to host more advanced web apps with the SRCF (Django, Flask, Rails, Node.js, etc.) and leverage their full flexibility, we provide these overview docs and more custom tutorials too:

We also provide a number of sample websites for you. You can explore them live at https://sample.soc.srcf.net/ and view the backend at /public/societies/sample.

You can host basically any kind of web application that can bind to a socket, including all of the popular frameworks like Flask, Django, Ruby on Rails, Express, and beyond. We provide tips and information on getting your apps to run on our web server.

Adding our badge

We encourage you to add the SRCF badge to your website so that others can find us. It’s a great way to help us out as it costs little to you but helps us out immensely, in turn allowing us to provide better services to you. You can find the badges here.

Connecting

We provide a webserver (currently named sinkhole), for hosting applications. You should connect to this server, not to the public login server, pip.

You connect to this server via SSH using your normal SRCF account name and password.

• Host: webserver.srcf.net
• Port: 22

Routing traffic to your app

The SRCF uses Apache to serve websites so if you need to run a backend web app, for example a Django, Rails or Express server, then you will need to forward web requests. See also our guidance on port binding.

Using UNIX sockets

You will need to configure your application to use a UNIX socket. The socket should only be accessible to you, which can be done by picking a path in your home directory (e.g. /home/ab123/myapp/web.sock) or by using appropriate file modes.

Then add the following to your .htaccess file, replacing <path-to-socket> with the path to your socket (e.g. /home/ab123/myapp/web.sock) and <url> with your domain name (e.g. ab123.user.srcf.net) :

RequestHeader set Host expr=%{HTTP_HOST}
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-For expr=%{REMOTE_ADDR}
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto expr=%{REQUEST_SCHEME}
RequestHeader set X-Real-IP expr=%{REMOTE_ADDR}
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ unix:<path-to-socket>|http://<url>/$1 [P,NE,L,QSA]

Using TCP ports

You will need to pick a port (we’ve used 999 here but you should pick a different one above 1024) and configure your application to bind to that port. Be aware that port-based forwarding offers less security than UNIX socket-based forwarding and that any other user will be able to forward requests to the same port you are using. For that reason, we don’t set the headers we do above as they can easily be forged by another user. Those things being considered, you can put the following in your .htaccess file to enable forwarding requests to a port:

RewriteRule "^(.*)$" http://localhost:999/$1 [P,NE,L,QSA]

Databases

MySQL and PostgreSQL accounts are included with your SRCF account.

Last modified on Monday Feb 28, 2022 by Richard Allitt