I have finally got everything working correctly (the status() bug still exists), and have typed up the following notes. Please feel free to add them to the Dancer Deployment.pod if you think they will be helpful to others. I spent a lot of time getting to this point, so I think these notes will be helpful to others. ----- Once we have downloaded Dancer, generated a project scaffolding, fired up dance.pl, and visited our website at http://localhost:3000/, we are faced with several decisions -- How am I going to serve this on my web server? Will I be able to have multiple Dancer-powered sites? How will this integrate with Apache? A typical web application developer is working on several applications on her development machine. If she is smart and lucky, her development machine is identical to her production server, so she doesn't have to second guess differences in modules, software versions and directory layouts. Still, there are a few differences. Under the Apache scenario, her web sites in development are stored on her computer under ~/Sites/app0 ~/Sites/app1 ~/Sites/app2 She is accessing her web sites on her development machine via URIs that look like http://localhost/app0 http://localhost/app1 http://localhost/app2 Apache is listening on the default port 80, and serving everything under ~/Sites as the DocumentRoot by simply adding $app_dir to http://localhost With the arrival of Dancer, the out-of-box model is different. For all purposes, dance.pl is the web server, and is listening on port 3000 by default. But, there cannot be multiple web servers on one port. So, she modifies the config file in each of her apps so she can fire up dance.pl in each of the apps, and have each one of them listen on different ports. Perhaps something like this app0 at http://localhost:3000/ app1 at http://localhost:3001/ app2 at http://localhost:3002/ Our developer wants to continue to serve some of her Apache apps as they are, but also experiment with a few new apps with Dancer, but access them without having to specify the different port numbers. The easiest way to accomplish this is via the Apache module mod_proxy. First, she enables mod_proxy in her httpd.conf. This is done by uncommenting the following lines in httpd.conf LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so If she is unlucky enough to not have the above modules available, then these modules will have to be compiled. Compiling mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http is out of the scope of this document. Now, she has to add the following proxy commands to httpd.conf ProxyRequests Off <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyPass /app0/ http://localhost:3000/ ProxyPassReverse /app0/ http://localhost:3000/ ProxyPass /app1/ http://localhost:3001/ ProxyPassReverse /app1/ http://localhost:3001/ ProxyPass /app2/ http://localhost:3002/ ProxyPassReverse /app2/ http://localhost:3002/ The above command instruct Apache to take the listed URIs at http://localhost/ and query them on their respective ports. This allows our developer to point the browser to http://localhost/app0/, and actually get a response back from http://localhost:3000/ However, the above is not enough, because trying to get something from http://localhost/app0 will fail (notice the lack of the trailing slash). To make sure that http://localhost/app0 also work, another Apache module called mod_rewrite is required using the following commands in httpd.conf RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/app0$ app0/ [R] RewriteRule ^/app1$ app1/ [R] RewriteRule ^/app2$ app2/ [R] Restart Apache, fire up dance.pl under each of the different app directories, each listening on different ports, and enjoy the dances. A few important notes: Since the new Dancer-powered websites are not going to be served by Apache, they really shouldn't be kept under the ~/Sites path, because that is being served automatically by Apache by virtue of being Apache's DocumentRoot. It is ok to locate the dances under some other hierarchy outside of Apache's reach. I have mine under ~/Dances ~/Dances/app0 ~/Dances/app1 ~/Dances/app2 The new websites might mix resources, perhaps getting some JavaScript framework files being served from other computers, or perhaps even from a traditional Apache website at http://localhost/lib, but also have resources local to the apps under their own 'public' directories (Dancer allows browsers to access resources under the 'public' directory). This can be accomplished by having HTML in main.tt like so <!-- app specific resources --> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" /> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css" /> <!-- resources from lib --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/lib/jquery/jquery-1.4.min.js"></script> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/lib/SyntaxHighlighter/Styles/shCore.css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="/lib/SyntaxHighlighter/Scripts/shCore.js"></script> Final note: Once everything is working, the apps will be moved to the production server. The production server will not be serving stuff from http://localhost, but will have a real DNS name. This will be accomplished using VirtualHosts under Apache, whereby one can serve multiple websites from the same server. Dancer can continue to function as above, but the proxy commands will have to be moved to respective VirtualHosts sections. That story is for another time. -- 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 =======================================================================