July 2010 - dancer-users - lists.preshweb.co.uk

Dancer QA
by franck 04 Aug '10

04 Aug '10

Hi all I would like to organize a QA day for Dancer. The idea is to: - reach 1k tests for Dancer - close/work on all issues reported on github/RT - test the branch "refactoring/app" [ http://github.com/sukria/Dancer/tree/refactoring/app] (which should be the new code base for 1.2) We will try to do this in august (probably saturday 14). More informations coming soon.

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Dancer deployment still confusing, difficult and a non-starter
by P Kishor 02 Aug '10

02 Aug '10

First, the perldancer.org domain was out for several days and emails to dancer-users mailing would bounce back ("rejected by recipient domain"). A conversation on IRC channel revealed that the DNS server was down, but nothing could be done about it until Sukrieh returned from a vacation. Would it be possible to not have such a single point of failure or blocking in the canonical, root domain of the web framework please? It gives the impression that the project has been abandoned. Nevertheless, while I am able to very quickly download, install and even create a basic dancer app, its deployment still remains a mystery to me. First, I will describe my working scenario in the hope that there might others with the same scenario, and then I will list what all I attempted and failed. I apologize for this email's length, but my hope is that it will lead to clearer and easier deployment notes with Dancer. I develop on my MacBook with Perl 5.12.1 installed under /usr/local/bin. My web projects live under ~/Sites, and are served by Apache2 running from /usr/local/apache2 (all custom installations). Any custom Perl libraries I develop go under ~/Library/Perl, and are available to all my web projects. I try to mimic the conditions on the actual production server as much as possible. One such server is a Mac OS X server, so its layout is almost identical to my MacBook, but another is a shared web host, most likely some variant of Linux. On that I get an html docs folder in my home folder, but I don't get access to tinkering with Apache which does all the serving. I can, for the most part, request custom Perl module installations, and I can use .htaccess files. Since these applications eventually get served from their own domain names, I try to not develop using http://localhost/app1 and http://localhost/app2. Doing so confuses me with regards to relative URLs and makes for a bit trickier development. Instead, I use virtual hosts with Apache, and I add the name of the virtual host to my /etc/hosts file. This allows me to get to my apps via http://app1.local and http://app2.local and so on. This way, when I eventually put the app in production, all I have to do is change the the host name from app1.local to app1.org and so on. While developing, I don't really worry about speed, so I just use cgi scripts with Apache... no persistent environment here. In fact, while on the Xserve I can install any persistent environment, on the shared web server I may not even have access to a persistent environment at all. So, I have to develop using the least common denominator, and then deploy with the best possible tools. Also, whatever deployment I choose, it is most likely to be Apache based. While it may not be the fastest, Apache is tried and tested, is available by default on whichever server I choose, and is even required by other projects. Now, on to deployment. The docs at Dancer::Deployment say that deploying http://localhost/dance/dispatch.cgi 500 Internal Server Error - Wrong http://localhost/dance/dispatch.cgi/ 200 OK - Right The above give me a generic Apache 404 error script not found or unable to stat: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/dispatch.cgi File does not exist: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/missing.html Actually, both of the above are wrong. It should really be http://localhost/myapp/public/dispatch.cgi/ But, then I get the following errors in Apache logs Unable to open /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/logs/development.log for writing, unable to log at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.1/Dancer/Logger/File.pm line 32, <DATA> line 16. Unable to open /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/logs/development.log for writing, unable to log at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.1/Dancer/Logger/File.pm line 32. Error while loading /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/app.psgi: unable to load application dance : Can't locate dance.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/public/lib /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.1/darwin-2level /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.1 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.12.1/darwin-2level /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.12.1 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl .) at (eval 60) line 2. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 60) line 2. Premature end of script headers: dispatch.cgi File does not exist: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/favicon.ico, referer: http://dance.local/public/dispatch.cgi/ File does not exist: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/missing.html, referer: http://dance.local/public/dispatch.cgi/ I can fix the errors re. not being able to open development.log for writing by changing permissions on it chmod -R 777 logs but, the Dancer script that creates the logs folder should have set the permissions correctly automatically so Apache can write to it. Nevertheless, the other error is more serious... app.psgi is unable to load application dance because it can't locate dance.pm in @INC. If you see above, @INC contains 'dance/public/lib', but 'lib' is actually sitting one level above under 'dance'. So, I move 'lib' down to 'dance/public'. But, now I get a dancer 404, and the following errors in Apache logs File does not exist: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/css, referer: http://dance.local/public/dispatch.cgi/ File does not exist: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/missing.html, referer: http://dance.local/public/dispatch.cgi/ File does not exist: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/favicon.ico, referer: http://dance.local/public/dispatch.cgi/ File does not exist: /Users/punkish/Sites/dance/missing.html, referer: http://dance.local/public/dispatch.cgi/ So, the interesting thing is, now I am getting the 404 via the dancer 404 template. So, dancer is running, and responding, but it is unable to grok the route. Plus, all the paths in the template are now wrong. Now what do I do? -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science =======================================================================

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If you like Dancer, say it :)
by Alexis Sukrieh 07 Jul '10

07 Jul '10

Hi, If you are a Dancer user and like the framework, there is a very good way to promote it. You can submit a CPAN rating review: http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Dancer Marketing is quite as important as code nowdays, and we should never forget about that. Promoting Dancer is helping the project, so give us a hand ;) Of course, if you run a blog or have a Twitter account, feel free to post and entry about Dancer. This will give more credit to Dancer and will be very appreciated! Thanks a lot. BTW I've just uploaded a new developer release[1] to CPAN, which provides new features, check the CHANGES[2] file. 1: http://search.cpan.org/~sukria/Dancer-1.1806_01/ 2: http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/SUKRIA/Dancer-1.1806_01/CHANGES Test reports are welcome as well! -- Alexis Sukrieh

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Problem with PLACK
by igor.bujna＠post.cz 07 Jul '10

07 Jul '10

Hello, I have problem, when starting my dancer aplication with plackup and in template use UTF8 characters such as "Čeština je pěkný jazyk". When I start aplication via Dancer start skript and after render the page, everything is ok. But when i start this via plackup and after render page i get message "body must be bytes and should not contain wide characters (UTF-8 strings)". This message is in file Plack/Middleware/Lint.pm in 'sub validate_res()' where test is: if (ref $res->[2] eq 'ARRAY' && grep utf8::is_utf8($_), @{$res->[2]}) { $croak->('body must be bytes and should not contain wide characters (UTF-8 strings).'); } When i comment this test the aplication, then run OK. I try this on http://github.com/sukria/ThisShit, when i put in main layout my UTF8 text "Čeština je pěkný jazyk". I think this problem is with plack, which can't use UTF8 text for rendering :(

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Re: [Dancer-users] Problem with PLACK
by Stephane 07 Jul '10

07 Jul '10

Hello, Did you try to do an "encode_utf8" before returning your content to Dancer (which then returns it to plackup)? I've had issues with encodings and Dancer, and the way I understand things, you must return bytes, not characters. The default stack does not enforce this, however. LWP works similarly as far as I can tell. The behavior you see is probably that your browser auto-detects UTF-8 when you use Dancer standalone (which doesn't verify the encoding and uses Perl's default handling of chars<->bytes conversion), while it seems that plackup verifies before sending. Stéphane

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