Several Google searches turned up precisely zero answers. After poking around I found the .htaccess file that WordPress so kindly generates for you:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

What this little guy is doing is displaying a nice pretty 404 page, instead of a plain old ugly Apache page. It does this by looking to see if there is a file or directory matching the file name in the request.

Obviously, there aren’t files and directories to correspond with your web app urls. The solution is, quite simply, to tell Apache not to go looking for files and directories when the request needs to go to your web application. So how do you that? Like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/myrailsapp.*
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Voila! Now Apache won’t try looking for any files or directories when the request begins with “myrailsapp.”

In the the article they suggest limiting the addresses from which the admin can be accessed. If you’re using Apache, here’s one way using the <Location> directive:

<Location /wp-admin>
   Order Deny,Allow
   Deny from all
   Allow from example.com 10.211.34.83
</Location>
<Location /wp-login.php>
   Order Deny,Allow
   Deny from all
   Allow from example.com 10.211.34.83
</Location>

 * Starting web server (apache2)...
Syntax error on line 141 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:
Invalid command 'Order', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

After a bit of Googling, I found this bug in Ubuntu. The lame part is it’s not been fixed, and probably won’t be since the focus is on Gutsy…

Anywho, it suggested loading mod_authz_host, like so:

sudo a2enmod authz_host

But when I tried to start Apache again, I got this:

 * Starting web server (apache2)...
Syntax error on line 145 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:
Invalid command 'TypesConfig', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

Grrr… Another Google search led me to this useful page, which told me the missing module here is mod_mime. Load that like so:

sudo a2enmod mime

And you should see:

 * Starting web server (apache2)...        [ OK ]