Today's internet challenge will be to set up a mysql/php blog on
sizzweb, a webserver written entirely in Guile scheme.
Like yesterday, the blog software for today will be
b2evolution version 4.0.3.
The webserver for today will be
sizzweb version 1.12.
Again, why would I even want to do such a thing? Because I find it fun. I don't make fun of you for going golfing, and that's an even bigger waste of time.
sizzweb depends on the
guile-www package.
I downloaded and installed guile-www-2.29.
A small bug in latest rev of guile-www-2.29 kept it from building on my machine
guile-www bug #32244.
Part 1: getting sizzweb to run
Last time I tried to install this, it was a bit of a failure (not that I tried very hard, or at all). The problem is that
sizzweb is part of a larger package called
ttn-do, and
ttn-do historically has been targeted on a fork of Guile that had a more powerful set of install and configure tools that the official Guile.
I downloaded
ttn-do-379.tar.gz and did
./configure and
make, and the build failed with an error in a call to
guile-tools.
guile-tools is distributed with
guile and is sort of a meta tool that calls on of a dozen other scripts that work with scheme sources.
ttn-do was looking for the
c2x script which is not a script in the mainline
guile distribution. This is the sort of thing I thought would happen. This means I won't be able to build the modules in the
ttn-do/zz directory because they rely on
c2x.
Also
guile-tools does not give a nice warning if it can't find a script.
Guile bug #32243
So, instead I directly copied the scheme files in
ttn-do and
ttn-to/zzz into my my guile site directory manually. Then, to get it to work I
- ttn-do/zzz/filesystem.scm: changed all calls to make-shared-substring to substring
- ttn-do/zzz/publishing.scm: use (ice-9 optargs) instead of (ice-9 optargs-kw)
I also added my own version of the module (ttn-do zz sys linux-gnu) to replace the one function that sizzweb uses from it.
(define-module (ttn-do zz sys linux-gnu)
#:use-module (system foreign)
#:use-module (rnrs bytevectors)
#:export (sendfile/never-fewer))
;;(define libc (dynamic-link "/usr/lib64/libc.so"))
(define libc (dynamic-link))
(define sendfile
(pointer->procedure
long ; really ssize_t, but, (system
; foreign) doesn't have a
; ssize_t.
(dynamic-func "sendfile" libc)
(list
int
int
unsigned-long ; Really this is a pointer to
; an off_t, but, we always
; pass it a null pointer
size_t)))
(define errno (dynamic-pointer "errno" libc))
(define (errno-val)
(let ((bv (pointer->bytevector errno int))) ;; assuming errno is a 4-byte int
(bytevector-s32-native-ref bv 0)))
(define (sendfile/never-fewer outfd infd unused count)
(let loop ((count count))
(let ((bytes-written (sendfile outfd infd 0 count)))
(cond
((< bytes-written 0)
(scm-error 'system-error
"sendfile/never-fewer"
(strerror (errno-val))
'()
(list (errno-val))))
((and (>= bytes-written count))
*unspecified*)
((and (> bytes-written 0) (> count bytes-written))
(loop (- count bytes-written)))))))
And with all that, I've got the webserver up and running.
Part 2: getting PHP to run
sizzweb has no native php support, but it does have a plug-in architecture called `servlets'. Basically you create a file named
servlets.scm and then write a custom responder that gets used when the input path matches a given regular expression
.
The way the servlets system works is that if it matches the regex it gets passed to the handler whether or not there is actually a document at that location. There would actually be a fair bit of work involved to get it to run PHP. Subtasks would include
- Adding index.php to the list of default files
- Checking to see if the php file is actually there, is not a symlink, and is readable
- Parsing the GET variables out of the URI
- And calling php-cgi
But that is enough hacking fun for one day. Tomorrow, we shall see what the future holds.