The great growling engine of change

To implement SSL through a Perl Catalyst application it is necessary to use an SSL proxy to relay the HTTP requests through HTTPS.  This setup also means we can use fastcgi for lightweight web calls instead of a full http server with all the overhead that requires.  That said, it has not been entirely straightforward setting-up the proxy.  Therefor, I have started some documentation on getting my current setup running.

This tutorial was what I used to get my companies Catalyst/CouchDB application running on a non-local environment because the official Catalyst tutorial was somewhat… lacking.

To get started we configure fastcgi.  Catalyst kindly provides a fastcgi handler as part of our build screens during project creation. To be able to use the fastcgi handler with a http proxie we need to setup Catalyst to use an internal ip port (much like using sockets or an internal bus) and then we configure our http proxy to listen to forward requests on that internal port.  A quick example test looks something like this:

script/myapp_fastcgi.pl -l 127.0.0.1:8100 -n 5

For long term use you will want to setup the system to run it as a service and start that service during boot.  Here is an example that works for sysinit on Fedora:

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: catalyst-projectname
# Required-Start: $local_fs $network
# Required-Stop: $local_fs $network
# Default-Start: 3 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 2 4 6
# Short-Description: Starts the FastCGI app server for the “projectname” catalyst site
# Description: The FastCGI application server for the “projectname” catalyst site
### END INIT INFO

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

# Source networking configuration.
. /etc/sysconfig/network

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
SITE_HOME=/usr/share/nginx/html
DAEMON=$SITE_HOME/script/projectname_fastcgi.pl
OPTS=”-l 127.0.0.1:8100 -n 5″
NAME=projectname
DESC=”projectname Application Server”
USER=apache

test -f $DAEMON || exit 0
# Check that networking is up.
[ “$NETWORKING” = “no” ] && exit 0

# set -e
lockfile=”/var/lock/subsys/projectname”
pidfile=”/var/run/${NAME}.pid”

start_daemon()
{
echo -n “Starting $DESC: ”
# echo “$NAME.”
daemon $DAEMON $OPTS
retval=$?
echo
[ $retval -eq 0 ] && touch $lockfile
return $retval
}

stop_daemon()
{
echo -n “Stopping $DESC: ”
# echo “$NAME.”
killproc -p $pidfile $NAME
retval=$?
echo
[ $retval -eq 0 ] && rm -f $lockfile
return $retval
}

reload_daemon()
{
# echo “$NAME.”
stop_daemon
start_daemon
}

case “$1” in
start)
start_daemon
;;
stop)
stop_daemon
;;
reload)
reload_daemon
;;
restart|force-reload)
stop_daemon
sleep 5
start_daemon
;;
*)
N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
echo “Usage: $N {start|stop|reload|restart|force-reload}” >&2
exit 1
;;
esac

exit 0

I will post more soon, but for now this was what I needed to get things started.