Hi. Just thought i’d ask this here before trying a specialist forum …
I have a small personal web site and i’d like to put some old flash content
on it, but as flash is being discontinued i’d like to use Ruffle
which requires that my web server is configured to serve .wasm files correctly.
Apparently this can be achieved by adding a line to a config file somewhere.
When i asked my web host about this, they replied :
“That’s not a language we support I’m afraid. We only support the very standard
stuff that LAMP servers include. There’s no way for our server to
interpret a wasm file.”
A webserver has to be configured to recognize and push a .wasm file. AFAIK, not many web server installations do this out of the box (“standard LAMP servers”).
It wouldn’t be challenging for your host admin to do this, but if they don’t want to you’re pretty much stuck. Possibly time to find a new host.
It’s annoying, but I don’t fault the web host in the slightest. There’s no real upside to them in supporting a little-used standard, and there’s the risk of a lot of support needs. Ruffle might be the most secure thing ever, but your web host still needs to conduct a security review, which is again a decent amount of work for little gain. And no matter what, it still represents a potential security hole they don’t have to worry about today.
Ah. thanks.
Irritating indeed.
There is a workaround … invite visitors to install the ruffle player extension to their browsers.
I’ll do that.
Cheers all.
Most web hosts allow you to configure your web site: add files (html, pdf, jpeg, wasm, htaccess, txt) and add folders to the root folder of your web site: most of those are content, but a .htaccess file configures the way the web server behaves, and robots.txt configures the behavior of web bots.
One of the lines you may need in your .htaccess file is
That’s what I was wondering. If it’s just a mimetype declaration (e.g. what you described), I think it’s dumb not to allow it, as it wouldn’t break anything else. But if it’s something more complicated, it could be an issue.
And if your provider doesn’t allow what you need, I think it’s perfectly fine I think to ask your users to install a plugin to use something that replicates Flash, since Flash was also a plugin that you had to install. You can set up your page to ask them to install it to use your content.
It wouldn’t work for a general webpage, but for special content like that, I think it’s an acceptable workaround. (Though if you can convert the content to a simple video or animated GIF, I’d do that.)
I’d also suggest contributing to the Flash preservation project Flashpoint if your content isn’t already there.
It’s a matter of cost and effort versus financial return. They COULD do it but, if you are the only one requesting it, they may feel it isn’t worth the effort to do it.
I think you may need a client add-in anyway: I don’t think that server-side WASM would do what you want, even if it was offered by your provider. (But my exposure to Ruffle is minimal)