Problems with Mint on Typo
Mint is a wonderful statistics package and if you haven’t tried it out yet I seriously suggest you do.
However, when installing Mint on a Typo weblog some users may have encountered an interesting problem. When entering http://yoursite/mint you get a 404 File not Found. However if you enter http://yoursite/mint/index.php it all works fine.
The problem arises because Rails is trying to map the directory mint to a controller. We want Rails to ignore the mint directory so that we can see it. This is a rather straightforward task.
The answer can be found on the Mint forum. Paste the following code into your .htaccess file which is in the public directory.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/mint.*
RewriteRule .* - [L]
That’s it. You needn’t do any more. If you want to know what is going on then keep reading.
RewriteCond
The line beginning RewriteCond defines a condition for the the RewriteRule it precedes. The condition takes two pieces of information. The first is a string to test and the second is the pattern to look for in the test string.
The %{REQUEST_URI} string is a server variable, in this case the URI entered into the browser by the user. The ^/mint.* string is the pattern to test for. The pattern specifies that the requested URI start with the string /mint and has anything following it.
RewriteRule
The next line, beginning RewriteRule specifies that the request should not be directed anywhere. The . (period), according to the mod_rewrite documentation, means “Any single character”. Therefore a request for /mint does not get redirected.
The last bit [L] stops the rewriting ending the condition.
Bibliography & Useful Links
If anyone has any links they think might be useful, feel free to post them. Any corrections to the article are more than welcome, I’m no expert.