[REBOL] Running REBOL on HostGator...
From: carl:cybercraft at: 29-Sep-2010 8:36
Hi all,
Prompted by Tim's recent post about web hosting, I thought I'd mention my experience
with getting REBOL scripts running on hostgator.com. I'd planned to do this after I had
some serious scripts running on my site, but I haven't got that far yet. However, test
scripts have worked and I've a cron-job running, so I know the basics work.
Firstly, before signing up, I'd asked HostGator if it was okay for REBOL to be installed
on a website hosted by them. Their reply was: "Yes, that executable can be installed
locally on your account. And assuming it was compiled in such a manner as to function
with our systems, it should run without error."
The reason I thought HostGator might allow this was because of this thread...
http://rebolforum.com/index.cgi?f=printtopic&topicnumber=15&archiveflag=archive
Next, I needed to know what version of REBOL to run, the answer being here...
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/pre-sales-questions/are-your-servers-unix-linux-or-windows-nt
So, "CentOS Linux x86", aka "Red Hat Linux", which equates to REBOL/Core for "Linux x86
Fedora". (Fedora being 'sponsored' by Red Hat.)
HostGator sites come with cPanel installed, and I used cPanel's file-manager to place
REBOL/Core on the site, the file-manager also handling the .tar.gz unpacking. I then
followed the instructions here...
http://www.rebol.com/docs/cgi1.html#section-7
to set the permissions and get scripts running. (The cPanel file-manager can be used
to set permissions.) And as described in the rebol.com docs linked to above, the following
is the format to use in the first line of your REBOL cgi scripts...
#!/home/your-account/rebol -c
Your scripts' file-names need to use a .cgi extension to run, but they can be placed
anywhere on your site, not just in the cgi-bin directory. (It's possible they could be
made to work with a .r extension, but I've not looked into that/asked about it.)
Finally, I used cPanel to get cron scripts running. The path for a cron script is of
the following format...
/home/user-name/dir-path/cron-script.cgi
All in all, this proved to be reasonably hassle-free and the HostGator responses prompt
and helpful. (Albeit before I'd signed up, I not needing to ask for any REBOL-related
help since.)
Hope that's of some use to someone. (And that there's nothing important I left out. Feel
free to ask any questions, anyway.)
-- Carl Read.