Using Deliverance as Middleware (with Proxying)

December 21st, 2009

Deliverance is a great library that lets you easily re-theme external websites on the fly. Designed as WSGI middleware, it can be easily combined with some proxying to integrate a bunch of websites together

You can use deliverance plus proxying out-of-the-box using the deliverance-proxy command. However, I was interested in using Deliverance as middleware from code. This turned out to be none too trivial to do — all the examples on the internet seemed to focus on using deliverance-proxy or using it in an ini file.

After much wrestling, most notably with odd issues with gzipped (deflated) content I got it working and you can find a demo implementation (see demo.py and README.txt) here:

http://rufuspollock.org/code/deliverance/

I should also mention the following sources which were all of help in my quest:

Posted by Rufus Pollock Filed in Code, Python, Software
No Comments »

Reverse Proxying to Wordpress.com

October 2nd, 2009

I wanted to do a reverse proxy to wordpress.com in order to integrate an existing wordpress.com blog into an existing site. This turned out to be a little trickier than I’d thought due to wordpress.com’s usage of gzip deflation of their output.

Figured this out thanks to sound advice here and here:

  ...

  <Proxy *>
        Allow from .mysite.com
  </Proxy>
  ProxyPass / myblog.wordpress.com
  ProxyPassReverse / http://myblog.wordpress.com/
  ProxyHTMLURLMap http://myblog.wordpress.com/ /
  <Location />
    SetOutputFilter proxy-html
    # get rid of Content-Encoding at wordpress end
    # To use this you'll need to do (on debian) a2enmod headers
    RequestHeader unset  Accept-Encoding

    # Alternative method: inflate then deflate again ... (requires more effort at our end)
    # Could NOT get this to work (though suggested by both reference sites!)
    # SetOutputFilter INFLATE;proxy-html;DEFLATE
  </Location>

  ....
Posted by Rufus Pollock Filed in Code, Hacks, Sysadmin
No Comments »