If you followed my last article you now have OFBiz (or Bonsai ERP) running behind nginx. But it isn’t yet taking advantage of nginx goodness. So next I am going to show you how to take the load of serving static content away from OFBiz, and give it to nginx instead.

OFBiz can quite happily service all http and https requests on its own, and many people run it this way.

However there are many possible reasons why you might want to put OFBiz behind a traditional http server, such as Apache. Perhaps you want to more efficiently serve static resources, or manage virtual domains, or restrict access in complicated ways, or also serve php or cgi pages.

Once we got used to using Mercurial and its Queue extension as I described previously in Vendor Branches: Mercurial, we found that updating to a new vendor version of OfBiz was typically quick and painless.

As I explained previously (Vendor Branches: The Solution), Mercurial along with its Queues extension is the cornerstone of the way we manage our customisations to OfBiz. In this article I will describe how we achieve this.

In my last post (Vendor Branches: The Problem) I summarised the problems we have had managing what is commonly known as a vendor branch. In this post I will describe part of the solution we are successfully using.

Managing your own customisations to a project such as OfBiz, while still being able to update when desired from the trunk version, is not simple. We tried many approaches over the years, and have finally found one we are happy with. It takes a little getting used to, but we’ve found it to be reliable and far less painful than any of the other methods we’ve tried.