[Dancer-users] dancer behind web proxy

[Stefan Oberwahrenbrock]

Hello!

Making my first moves on the "development dance floor" I stumbled over 
an issue I'd like to mention: When I ran "dancer -a mywebapp" to start 
my first application on a linux machine, the shell/command seemed to 
freeze. Quite confused I realized after some tries, that the helper 
script ("/usr/local/bin/dancer") finally finished sucessfully - but only 
after round about 3 minutes of apparently doing nothing!

What happend? Using "strace" I found out, that the helper script tries 
to establish an internet connection. I traced it down to the subroutine 
"version_check". Obviously this subroutine checks whether the locally 
installed version of "Dancer" is up to date. To achieve this, an 
HTTP-request to "http://search.cpan.org/dist/Dancer/CHANGES" is made.

Basically this is a good idea, but in my case it also was the cause for 
the unexpected bevahiour/delay: The linux machine I was using is located 
behind a corporate web proxy - direct internet access is not possible. 
That proxy was configured properly in the linux system (environment 
variable "http_proxy") and on applicaton level (e. g. CPAN access). 
Unfortunately the helper script does not seem to utilise proxy settings 
and gets caught by some default timeout mechanisms.

 From my point of view it would be nice, if the helper script was able 
to cope with proxies - at least it would be nice, if the script printed 
out some message about the attempted internet access. Could be a 
valuable hint for proxy-plagued novice like me ;-)

Greetings,
Stefan Oberwahrenbrock