[Dancer-users] Follow-up: using Starman for powering dancer apps

[Mr. Puneet Kishor]

Following up on my own email, I discovered a solution, and encountered another problem. See below, but note, the deployment documentation is still woefully inadequate --


On Jul 3, 2011, at 5:59 PM, Mr. Puneet Kishor wrote:

> I have been using Dancer exclusively with Apache until now, but in a new environment, I want to experiment with Starman (or any other perl-based server) via Apache proxy. The machine in question is running Apache, and I am not inclined to tinker with that more than the minimum necessary. 
> 
> I created an app "foo" in ~/Documents/www. I am able to run it like so 
> 
> ~/Documents/www/foo$ plackup -E deployment -s Starman --workers=10 -p 5001 -a bin/app.pl
> 2011/07/03-17:43:13 Starman::Server (type Net::Server::PreFork) starting! pid(3374)
> Binding to TCP port 5001 on host *
> Setting gid to "501 501 501 401 204 100 98 80 61 12 102 402"
> 
> Going to http://127.0.0.1:5001/ gives me my app "foo"
> 
> Now, I added the following in the apache conf file
> 
> ----
> ProxyRequests Off
> 
> <Proxy *>
>        Order deny,allow
>        Allow from all
> </Proxy>
> 
> ProxyPass        /foo http://127.0.0.1:5001
> ProxyPassReverse /foo http://127.0.0.1:5001
> ----
> 
> and then, going to http://mycomputer.local/foo also returns my app "foo" correctly. Ok, then I added another app "bar" under ~/Documents/www (sibling to "foo"). Now, I am trying to run multiple apps as per the instructions at [http://search.cpan.org/~sukria/Dancer-1.3060/lib/Dancer/Deployment.pod] under the heading "Running multiple apps with Plack::Builder". I created the following web.psgi file in ~/bin
> 
> ----
> use Dancer ':syntax';
> use Plack::Builder;
> 
> setting apphandler => 'PSGI';
> 
> my $app1 = sub {
> 	my $env = shift;
> 	setting appdir => '/Users/punkish/Documents/www/foo',
> 	setting appname => 'foo';
> 	load_app "foo";
> 	Dancer::Config->load;
> 	my $request = Dancer::Request->new( env => $env );
> 	Dancer->dance( $request );
> };
> 
> my $app2 = sub {
> 	my $env = shift;
> 	setting appdir => '/Users/punkish/Documents/www/bar',
> 	setting appname => 'bar';
> 	load_app "bar";
> 	Dancer::Config->load;
> 	my $request = Dancer::Request->new( env => $env );
> 	Dancer->dance( $request );
> };
> 
> builder {
> 	mount "/foo" => builder {$app1};
> 	mount "/bar" => builder {$app2};
> };
> ----
> 


Looking at [https://github.com/sukria/Dancer/commit/6c7ea733d5eac1d9ccfe39d70580ecf7d189edd4], I discovered that the documentation is wrong. Per the fix suggested at the above commit link, I changed the above to 

my $app1 = sub {
	my $env = shift;
	local $ENV{DANCER_APPDIR} = "/Users/punkish/Documents/www/foo";
	setting appdir => "/Users/punkish/Documents/www/foo";
	load_app "foo";
	Dancer::App->set_running_app('foo');
	Dancer::Config->load;
	my $request = Dancer::Request->new( env => $env );
	Dancer->dance( $request );
};

> and then I entered the following command:
> 
> ~/bin$ plackup -E deployment -s Starman --workers=10 -p 5001 -a ~/bin/web.psgi
> 
> But, now I get "Not Found" error. So, besides generally seeking guidance for this, I have the following specific questions --
> 
> One, in "setting appdir => '/Users/punkish/Documents/www/foo'" what exactly is my appdir? Is '/Users/punkish/Documents/www/foo' correct?
> 

The above appdir is correct.

> Two, are both "foo" and "bar" going to be accessible at http://127.0.0.1:5001/? Do I just add the following lines to my httpd.conf
> 
> ----
> ProxyPass        /foo http://127.0.0.1:5001
> ProxyPassReverse /foo http://127.0.0.1:5001
> ProxyPass        /bar http://127.0.0.1:5001
> ProxyPassReverse /bar http://127.0.0.1:5001
> ----
> 

I have to change the above to 

ProxyPass        /foo http://127.0.0.1:5001/foo
ProxyPassReverse /foo http://127.0.0.1:5001/foo
ProxyPass        /bar http://127.0.0.1:5001/bar
ProxyPassReverse /bar http://127.0.0.1:5001/bar

Now, I can access http://myserver.com/foo and http://myserver.com/bar and get my Dancer apps.

There is a new problem -- seems like relative paths for files in the public folder are not calculated properly. If I request http://myserver.com/foo, I get the content, but I don't get any of the stylesheets in '/Users/punkish/Documents/www/foo/public/css' (they all result in 404). On the other hand, if I request http://myserver.com/foo/ (note the trailing slash) then the path to the stylesheets is resolved correctly. How do I fix this?

Additionally, I still don't know the answer to the following two questions.

> Three, how do I run plackup in the background? I want to run it, but be able to close the shell, and even logout and have it running.
> 
> Four, if I have a single web.psgi as above, one disadvantage is that if I tinker with any one app, and have to turn off or restart Starman, it will affect all the apps powered by Starman. Perhaps a better situation would be to have a separate Starman process for each app. What is the best practice here?
> 
> Puneet.
> 
>