[Dancer-users] Serving DirectoryIndex via Dancer fails

[Mr. Puneet Kishor]

On Mar 17, 2011, at 9:31 AM, David Precious wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 08:49 -0500, Mr. Puneet Kishor wrote:
>> My httpd.conf is set to serve DirectoryIndex index.html and index.cgi. 
> 
> httpd.conf is irrelevant to Dancer's behaviour.
> 
>> Yet, if I go to [http://punkish.org/geoweb] or [http://punkish.org/opengov], Dancer 
>> thinks I am trying to query for a page called geoweb or opengov -- I was under the 
>> impression that it would first see if by adding a trailing slash to the requested 
>> URI, it could located static directory.
> 
> It'll simply look for a matching file and serve it if found.  Dancer's
> static file serving is designed simply to serve up static files
> (images/CSS/Javascript etc) for a dynamic Dancer-powered web-app, not
> really to be a webserver to replace Apache/Nginx etc.  In fact, for a
> busier site, I'd recommend configuring e.g. Nginx in front of the Dancer
> app to serve up the static files itself, and only pass through the
> requests which actually need to be handled by the Dancer app.
> 
> I don't personally think that Dancer's static file serving should be
> extended to support DirectoryIndex etc; when you start to need that sort
> of thing, you should probably let a proper web server do it.
> 
> Why not just configure Apache to serve those specific static sites
> itself, rather than involving Dancer in it?

What you explain above makes sense, but not completely (to me). I thought I was doing just that -- having Dancer serve dynamic portion of my site, and letting Apache do its work for the static parts. All Dancer had to do was to determine whether a static file or directory was being requested; if yes, then let Apache do its job. In fact, if I understand correctly, the sequence is like so --

My .htaccess is

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule (.*) /dispatch.cgi/$1 [L]

Apache receives a request for http://punkish.org(.*)

if (.*) is not a directory or a filename, Apache hands the job to Dancer via dispatch.cgi

So, if I understand correctly, Dancer shouldn't even have gotten involved when http://punkish.org/geoweb was requested, because Apache would have determined that I was requesting a directory. In other words, I am not asking for Dancer to be extended to replace Apache/Nginx, but to not get involved when a directory or a file are requested by name.

With regards to Nginx, I am studying how to move to it, but there are many issues with it that are not clear to me. Baby steps for now.

Many thanks,

Puneet.