RESOLVED: See my comment below! Hope it helps someone else out too!
Is anyone out there running Wordpress and using Wordbay, or another feed-based plugin in a LOCAL environment, like under XAMPP/LAMPP?
I don’t usually ask for help, especially not via my blog, it’s not very masculine, or English and I am anxious to remain seen as both, of course. However, this issue might be of interest to other users of Wordpress and Wordbay. To date I have been developing Wordbay using a “live” blog - a test blog full of junk on my hosting service that I use to test things, and it’s been fine till now.
However, some of the new changes I need to make (especially with introducing WP’s “native” RSS support based on Simplepie) are causing server hangs and whatnot and I really need to switch to my local environment for speed and so I don’t get suspended by Bluehost! But under LAMPP (Linux XAMPP) I cannot get the feed fetching to work at all - Wordpress works fine, but some sort of permissions issue (not allow_url_fopen, I have that set to true) prevents feeds and I think plugins too from being fetched from a remote location. I am using pretty much a bog-standard Ubuntu Koala install.
If anyone has experience of getting this working and can point me in the right direction I would appreciate the help and you would be helping the further development of WordBay!
Posted on March 24th, 2010 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
RESOLVED! The Internet is great, if you ask a question and wait for long enough with no reply then you eventually figure it out yourself!
Just in case anyone else has this issue, it is to do with a setting in the Apache config (httpd.conf) which is in your lampp/etc/ directory. The setting is “ServerName” and should be set to your IP address and port number (usually 80), though I think you can put anything here as long as it’s a valid address. By default it is set to “localhost” and remote servers presumably won’t or even can’t respond to a request from an invalid host name like localhost.
Markowe - can you give an example of the server name - are you talking about giving it a domain name (e.g. localdev.com)? or simply changing the name element - e.g. fom local host to something like devserver?
Gaz
Yes, I should have been clearer - I followed what it says in the instructions in the Apache config file, namely to put my actual domain and port, or if I don’t have one, my IP address, which is what I did. To be honest, I tried a different random IP address and that worked fine too, so I guess it just has to be something valid, i.e. something that a DNS server can resolve, though I guess it would be polite to put your real IP address. I am not an Apache buff, so I am not exactly sure what the purpose of the setting is, and don’t really have time to find out…
Been thinking about this, and it seems strange that remote servers won’t speak to a server called localhost when so many hosting services use that same name for their webservers.
Must be something else at play here - possibly the port number is more important than the name/IP element
I know under WAMPserver the same setting demands port 80 or it won’t fire up Apache - its a pain for me as I have to shut down ISA server and Proxy server if I want to run WAMP to do some development - you can only have one server (e.g. Apache or ISA) running on any one port on any one system. You can run them side by side if one is port 80 and the other is (e.g.) port 81, but the server on port 81 will have connection issues and the router will need configured to redirect servername “x” to port 81 not port 80 ….. but that’s a whole new can of worms.
Gaz
Oh, yes, I can imagine it would be an added complication if you want to run stuff in parallel. As for the localhost thing, I guess actually that on a hosting service, although “localhost” is how internal traffic is directed, this Apache setting would NOT be set to “localhost”, it would be set to the actual domain of the host, or the server box or whatever.
Yeah, you’re right Markowe - sorry, wasn’t thinking clearly re the server naming … got my head too deep inside migrating a real estate website between hosting companies and having a pain in the butt with a lacksidaisicle client not responding to questions for instructions in a timely manner.
Coffee needed - please supply intravenously from 45-gallon drums, stronger the better.
Gaz