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Using Manila alongside other web servers

Manila has a built-in web server. Since all web servers listen for requests on at least one IP address, usually on port 80, Manila 's web server will likely conflict with other web servers you have installed on the same computer.

If you're already running a web server you will have to work out the port conflict, since only one server can run on a given port.

There are a number of possible solutions to this problem.

Use separate computers 

The easiest option is to run Manila and your other web server on separate machines.

Before you install Manila, make sure to disable any other web server running on the machine or install Manila on a machine on which no other web server is installed.

Use separate ports 

Configure Manila to listen on a port other than port 80. This is the easiest solution, but your websites' URLs will have a port number in them, like http://www.yourdomain.com:8080/.

Open the Manila application and stop the web server if it's running, choose Web->Web Server->Stop. Then choose Web->Web Server->Set Port. A common alternate port is port 8080. Enter 8080 and then restart the server.

If you choose this option, you will need to change the URL of any of the default sites to include the new port. Also, update the base domain for new sites on the Hosting settings page in the Frontier Admin website so new Manila sites include the port number in the URL.

If you want friendlier URLs for your Manila sites, you can configure static rendering. This will make Manila write its web pages to a sub-directory of your other server's web folder, and your other web server will serve the sites.

You edit using the port 8080 URLs as above, and your readers see the sites as served by your non-Frontier web server on port 80.

There are disadvantages to this approach: you can't use macros to generate dynamic elements in your pages (elements that change with each page-load), and Frontier will not count page reads on the static server.

Serve static sites with Manila 

You can use Manila instead of your other web server to serve your static websites. This approach assumes you're not using CGIs, or SSI.

On the Domains setting page, you can setup Manila to serve pages from disk.

Windows and IIS 

Using two IP addresses, you can configure Manila to listen on one IP address and let Internet Information Server answer on the other one.

In Manila, open the user.inetd.config.http table. Create a new string value called ip that contains the IP address that you want Manila to listen on (something like 102.20.78.207). Then restart Manila to complete the setup.

Note: IIS 5.0 and newer releases introduced a new feature called socket pooling that requires some additional steps to get this working.

Mac OS X and Apache 

There are two more solutions if your server is running MacOS X and Apache:

1. You can configure MacOS X to use two IP addresses, and then set up Apache to listen on one IP address on port 80, and Frontier to listen on the other IP address, also on port 80. This is a little complicated to set up, but will give nice results.

2. If multiple IP addresses are not an option, and you need to keep Apache running, then it's possible to configure Apache to act as a proxy for requests that are intended for Frontier/Manila. This requires that you do a little work in your apache.conf file (Apache's configuration file), to tell Apache how to forward the requests. There's some additional tips on this setup from the Frontier for Mac OS X site.

The advantage of the second approach is that you get seamlessness between Manila and Apache running on the same IP address (or domain name), but the disadvantage is that depending on how you'll use Frontier, you'll need to add a few lines to apache.conf for each new site you create.