[Dancer-users] perl dance multiple hosting @dotgeek

[David Precious]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2012 20:01:30 +0200
gurugeek <gurugeekphp at gmail.com> wrote:

> hello,
> we are finalising a totally free hosting service for programmers (
> dotgeek.org). We used to run this in 2004-2005 with PHP 5 etc. and we
> are now trying to extend the service to offer, in addition to PHP,
> MySQL and Ruby (Sinatra, Camping) with Dancer.
> 
> I did try it yesterday and today and I think it is very interesting
> and we would like to add support for dancer.

That's awesome - I'll be happy to provide whatever help I can.


> I have a quick question regarding the best solution for a multiple
> hosting environment (we are using apache with a and we have a proper
> security system in place). According to your deployment guide the
> PSGI + Apache setup will require the application URL in the vhost
> configuration
> 
> PerlSetVar psgi_app /websites/myapp.example.com/app.pl
> 
> this might be an issue if the user rename the application. In sinatra
> with a passenger  deployment (aka mod_ruby) you can define a full
> public folder and through the config.ru file, that is easier to edit
> from the users that will have only SFTP access, you define which
> application you wish to run.
> 
> Is there a similar option with Dancer or there is a need to declare
> the app name in the apache vhost configuration ?

You could probably set up e.g. /home/$username/app.pl or similar which
they can edit, which loads the appropriate app; they could edit that to
choose which app to load, perhaps?

Or use some Apache trickery to extract a subdomain from the query and
use that as the path, as people often do with mass name-based virtual
hosting, so e.g. app1.user.dotgeek.org is /home/$user/$app1/bin/app.pl
etc - that way they could just upload a new app and hit
$appname.$user.dotgeek.org or similar and have it Just Work (in theory).

> I would also welcome any feedback about this service that will
> essentially offer dancer + mysql + sqlite totally free. Do you think
> it would be interested and help users to get started ?

Certainly - the ability for a user to try out their first Dancer app
for free without having to install stuff is likely to be of use to
people I think.  This is something I sort of toyed with the idea of
trying to offer myself, but I decided I didn't have the time to
implement it in a secure enough way and manage it closely enough to
limit abuse etc (and to deal with the users, who from past experience
will expect the moon on a stick, even though they're not paying a
penny...)

I note you've got reCAPTCHA which should keep out some users though, as
it's become almost unusable these days :)

Anyway - I, and the other Dancer core devs, will be happy to provide
whatever assistance we can to you in order to get Dancer support into
dotgeek.org.

Cheers!

Dave P

-- 
David Precious ("bigpresh") <davidp at preshweb.co.uk>
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