Making rails-reverse-proxy work for a site not on Webflow with a blog hosted on Webflow with Href Prefix #35
Description
I wrestled with making this gem work with Webflow for a few days. Hopefully this will help someone do this in minutes.
Background:
We have a Rails 5 website on www.asdf.com (not the actual site), that is not hosted by Webflow. We use Cloudflare.
We have a blog that someone built on Webflow at asdf-blog.webflow.io (not the actual blog).
Goal
Make it so that www.asdf.com/blog points to asdf-blog.webflow.io. The url still shows as www.asdf.com/blog, but displays the content at asdf-blog.webflow.io.
Also, make it so that www.asdf.com/blog/posts/my-first-post (with /blog) still shows a url of www.asdf.com/blog/posts/my-first-post (with /blog), but displays the content at asdf-blog.webflow.io/posts/my-first-post (without /blog).
Hint
On Webflow, do not mess with changing slugs on Designer.
Just change the project settings under Hosting and Custom Code.
Steps
I followed the directions at https://university.webflow.com/article/href-prefix
For those steps:
Step 1 - This was already done.
Step 2 - I got someone to pay for the plan.
Step 3 - I did the following - installing the gem, adding the routes, and adding the controller.
In my Rails app, I installed this rails-reverse-proxy gem.
In routes.rb, I added:
get "/blog/*path", to: "blog#index"
get "/blog", to: "blog#index"
I added the controller:
# frozen_string_literal: true
class BlogController < ApplicationController
include ReverseProxy::Controller
BLOG_URL = "https://asdf-blog.asdf.com"
def index
reverse_proxy BLOG_URL, path: "/#{params[:path]}"
end
end
Step 4 - Two parts - on Webflow and on Cloudflare.
Step 4a - On the Webflow project settings, under the Hosting tab, I added a custom domain, asdf-blog.asdf.com aka BLOG_URL.
Step 4b - On Cloudflare, I arranged a rule to be set up, which is hinted at during Step 4a.
Type was CNAME.
Name was asdf-blog (the same subdomain as what I set up for the custom domain on Webflow project settings under Hosting).
Content was proxy-ssl.webflow.com.
Proxy status was DNS (a Proxy status of Proxied did not work at the time).
Step 5 - On Webflow project settings, under Custom Code, I set Href Prefix to /blog.
Step 6 - I clicked the Save Changes and the Publish button for the publish destinations, especially publishing to asdf-blog.asdf.com.
Note
The links on the Rails 5 website, asdf.com/blog (with a path that is prepended with /blog), will work because those requests will go through BlogsController, and the path is getting changed to /#{params[:path]} (removing /blog from the request to Webflow).
However, the links on asdf-blog.webflow.io and asdf-blog.asdf.com will not work because of the Href Prefix adding /blog to all links, but that doesn't matter in terms of the goals for making asdf.com/blog work. This is because requests made to Webflow directly will have /blog and will not have that request changed by BlogsController. Webflow will return a 404 because it doesn't know anything about /blog.