LiveCode Server 8.1 - installing

[Richard Gaskin]

Graham Samuel wrote:

 > Hi Richard
 >
 > I don’t have any desire to frighten the DreamHost horses! However my
 > query was a very simple one, simply to answer Peter’s question.  DH
 > support has already come back to me - apparently I’m using Ubuntu
 > 12.04.5 LTS on my site

If memory serves they switched to Ubuntu with that version (had been 
using Debian), and I'd wager they'll be replacing it with 14.04 soon 
since 12.04 reaches EOL next April.

That won't affect your stuff, though. DH has a good track record of 
upgrading infrastructure without disrupting service.


 > If you run LC on DH often, can you explain to a deeply ignorant
 > person such as myself -

Anyone who can set himself up in as fine a living situation as you have 
can't be too ignorant. :) I've not forgotten the invitation you kindly 
extended to me and my wife to visit when we all met at the Malta 
conference - and indeed these sorts of issues are much easier to work 
out in person!  Ideally I should go there, or you should take vacation 
in southern California soon - we could work this out in minutes, and 
spend the rest of the afternoon enjoying either a California or French 
wine. :)


But in lieu of that for now, what's see what we can do here:

 > is it really necessary for DH to carry as many copies of LC Server
 > as there are users? Can’t LC Server be somewhere near the root of
 > the tree so to speak, so that everyone who wants to reference it
 > can do so?

That's a conversation I'd love to have with them some day, and one of 
the reasons I like to meet DH team members whenever I have a chance 
(that, and they're generally good company).

But right now it's not a problem:  it's common on a shared hosting 
service to have more than a hundred accounts on a single machine, and 
chances are that today yours is the only account on your server using 
LiveCode Server.

Of course we hope to change that over time.  And as more of us make 
great sites using it perhaps we will.

And when enough other customers are using it, we'll be in a good 
position to strike up a conversation with their marketing team about the 
value of offering LiveCode Server pre-installed.

But for now most hosting companies tend to offer only a few languages 
pre-installed, usually those beginning with "P" (Perl, PHP, Python), and 
sometimes Ruby.

Most other engines that can be used as CGIs will need to be added by the 
user to their own account, as we do with LiveCode.


 > If not, then my next question is “why did just replacing the whole
 > 'LiveCode Server' folder within my domain (it was in the cgi-bin
 > folder) not work as it had before?" Do I really have to start
 > tweaking command lines?

My hunch would be that perhaps your original post followed Stephen's 
guide and added a .htaccess file inside your "LiveCode Server" folder, 
so dropping in your new folder replaced everything that LC provides in 
that folder but not the .htaccess file you'd added before.

 From Stephen's notes:

    this one inside the cgi-bin directory

        Options ExecCGI
        SetHandler cgi-script

<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2015-July/216377.html>

If the executable bit is set on the LiveCode engine itself, it may be 
that adding that .htaccess file back into the "LiveCode Server" folder 
is all you need.


 > If you want to know what the error is, I can’t invoke LC Server at
 > all, for example invoking ‘example.lc’ etc from a browser, and as far
 > as I can see, when I invoke an LC script via the FastSpring store,
 > the corresponding .lc file isn’t executed. Before my mis-upgrade, the
 > execution did take place. I get
 >
 >> -- ERROR --
 >> com.brightmarket.core.license.LicenseException
 >> Remote license generator failed: 
http://www.mysite.com/MRScriptForFastSpringMac.lc, HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

Try:

1. Double-checking that the LC Server engine file is set to executable;

2. Make sure you have the .htaccess file noted above in your cgi-bin 
folder per Stephen's instructions.

If that fails, then:

3. Make a very simple test file in your web root and try calling it from 
your browser, something like:

<?lc put "Hello World "& the seconds ?>

If that works but your shopping cart doesn't, it would seem the issue 
lies somewhere between your script and the cart.

But if that test script doesn't work we can get it to work. Just let me 
know.  Or drop by. :)


 > [Rant: My position by the way is that I am so old that I can remember
 > programming computers that didn’t even know how to boot themselves,
 > and command lines would have been a luxury, a la Monty Python… but
 > now I just want to get on with it and leave what’s under the hood
 > under the hood. Of course I’m willing to learn, but I see that I have
 > failed to understand some structural stuff about how hosting
 > companies organise their servers and what the fundamentals of *nix
 > are… and somehow this is taken for granted by most of the people who
 > want to explain stuff. I have noticed this tendency even from the
 > mother ship when LCB is being discussed. Guess I’m just to old. end
 > Rant]

Funny, I was just having a very similar conversation with another 
LiveCode friend the other day.  All this learning get multiplied even 
more once we get sufficiently paranoid about security - watch the Mr 
Robot series and you'll never touch a computer again! :)

But seriously, you're far from alone.  And you're in good company.  Even 
the young 'uns sometimes get burnt out doing server admin, they just 
want to write the code for their app and leave the config stuff for 
someone else.

And that's where PaaS comes in.  Heroku is _very_ popular (and there are 
many other services like it) for the same reasons you expressed: 
sometimes developers just want to have fun and not get mired down in 
arcana of Apache and Linux management.

Being relatively new to the server space (and a bit limited for some 
larger-scale uses by having only CGI without FastCGI or Apache mod 
options), LiveCode Server currently has only one third-party PaaS-like 
service that I know of, hostm.com

But folks seem to like it.  And they provide exactly what you asked for 
at the outset of your email:  they have only one copy of each supported 
version of the LC engine, and all users on their system use that one 
install without having to set it up for themselves.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com