I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to debug an issue that made me hit my head against the wall while it lasted.

I run multiple instances of WordPress, and with it, comes a nice little editor bundled called TinyMCE. But on my main WordPress installation (this very blog, dear reader, where you are reading this from), TinyMCE wouldn't come up, it wouldn't render properly on the browser, it didn't matter if it was my main browser, Chrome, or Firefox, Safari, cached, uncached, it was just broken. Since I hadn't have the time to go through this issue before, I was using a different editor installed as a plugin. LAME. And coward.

Anyway, I found out that one of the scripts wp-tinymce.php was being returned truncated. Because of that, Firebug would report that some TinyMCE bullshit wasn't defined (JavaScript, oh I'm not very fond of you). Oh, well. I tested calling that script under curl separately and in fact, it was only returning a fraction of the script, 44K out of the actual 200+K. I also found out that even though my nginx installation had gzip compression enabled and the PHP had zlib as well, the script wouldn't process the tinymce.js.gz but it was returning directly tinymce.js. It's alright, I just wanted it to work, no matter if it wouldn't go through gzip, that'd be a matter of some other day.

After a lot of googling I ended up reading this blog post (in Portuguese), suggesting to make sure the file permissions for both the client_body_temp and fastcgi_temp directories allowed the user running nginx (www-data in my case) to write in them. Apparently large scripts would start writing to disk on them temporarily while processing the shit. Of course, you wouldn't have this issue if you are running an nginx from your operating system package manager (like Debian's), but this might very well happen when you are running a custom nginx with separate modules and all sorts of crap on top of it:

chown www-data:www-data -R /usr/local/nginx/fastcgi_temp/;
chmod -R 777 /usr/local/nginx/fastcgi_temp/;
chown www-data:www-data -R /usr/local/nginx/client_body_temp/;
chmod -R 777 /usr/local/nginx/client_body_temp/;

Obrigado, republicavirtual.com.br

During DebConf9 I had the opportunity to work together with Señor Micah to try to bring Passenger back to shape and get it back to the NEW queue on Debian. We spent way too much time dealing with the build  for the pkg-ruby-extras build model than to the actual fixing and updating. At the end we came up with a very well updated and DFSG-compatible (in contrast to the one that Brightbox provides, which isn't bad either to be honest) package for the 2.2.4 version.

Our current main interest was trying to get the package into Debian by cleaning up the licensing issues on some of the included files and try to come up with improvements in the near future (such as using Passenger directly from Nginx, instead of the Apache-only module). The future is bright and it'll bring sunshine to all of us.

Given that the package is still on the queue and there's a hell lot of other packages to be processed, you can grab the package here and if it fulfills your expectations, make sure you offer me and/or Micah a beer next time you see us around.