[Dancer-users] Dancer deployment still confusing, difficult and a non-starter

[sukria]

Hi,

On Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:38:39 -0500, P Kishor <punk.kish at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, I was off for two weeks with no connection available around me
(was on vacation in Spain) and the server where all my personal projects
are hosted went down during this time. That's bad luck.

I'm aware that gives a negative impression over the all project and people
involved with it (developers and users), and for that I sincerly apologize.
But you have to remind that Dancer is a free software project, built upon
goodwill and freetime, and with no income money at all. That means that we
might not have the very best hosting architecture, 24/7 supervision and all
what you could expect from a company.

Now, I'm openminded: if a company here offers to host perldancer.org, I'll
consider the opportunity seriously. 
 

[...] 
> 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


Well, this is very difficult for me to help you without seing your Apache
VirtualHost configuration. You may have done lots of things here, so
please, paste your configuration here.

[...]
> 
> 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.

Hmm, no. You deploy your app under Apache, then you have (as the
administrator) to care about permissions. That is, your app will be served
by Apache, meaning that the user that runs the Apache process will have to
own read/write access to your log files. Dancer as now way do know that
before you deploy, and could not change the permission itself as you may
need root privileges to do that.

 
> 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

No. You don't want to do that. the lib directory must not be moved. The
error (and the fix) is elsewhere.
[...]
> 
> Now what do I do?

Paste your apache configuration so we can try to reproduce the issue
first.

Regards,

    Alexis