Deploying Rails with Pound REST headache

Here’s a quick tip if you’re using Pound to proxy web requests to a number of mongrel back-ends. If you’ve discovered the joy of REST thanks to the recent Rails 1.2 you might stumble upon the following; by default Pound only allows HTTP GET, POST and HEAD.

You need to explicitly allow the PUT and DELETE verbs.

For newer Pound versions:

xHTTP value – Defines which HTTP verbs are accepted. The possible values are:

0 (default) accept only standard HTTP requests (GET, POST, HEAD).

1 additionally allow extended HTTP requests (PUT, DELETE).

2 additionally allow standard WebDAV verbs (LOCK, UNLOCK, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, SEARCH, MKCOL, MOVE, COPY, OPTIONS, TRACE, MKACTIVITY, CHECKOUT, MERGE, REPORT).

3 additionally allow MS extensions WebDAV verbs (SUBSCRIBE, BPROPPATCH, POLL, BMOVE, BCOPY, BDELETE, CONNECT).

4 additionally allow MS RPC extensions verbs (RPC_IN_DATA, RPC_OUT_DATA).

xHTTP 2

Older Pound versions:

ExtendedHTTP value – if value is 1, allow extended HTTP requests (PUT, DELETE). By default, Pound only allows GET, POST and HEAD.

ExtendedHTTP    1

I’m currently having an issue with the older version of Pound so I’m going to try upgrading to the latest release.

References

Pound

Deploying Rails with Pound in front of Apache and Mongrel on Redhat ES4 with Ensim – Part 1