Month: May 2012

After we have fastcgi working for Catalyst, we then need a proxy http service to actually to the page response work.  There are a number of solutions available to handle this but recently I have been messing with nginx.  nginx is a fastcgi compatible web server designed specifically for speed and quickness. While nowhere near as feature complete as Apache, it provides enough functionality to host some very large, vary busy web service companies.

In the interest of total disclosure, a fairly significant portion of the information I am provided I gleaned off an outstanding tutorial by Richard Wallman.  Basically you need to create a new server instance config file for your new nginx application proxy.  Open a text editor as root and create a new file /etc/nginx/config.d/mynewserver.conf and add following:

server {
server_name  app.mysite.org;
# Let’s have a server alias as well

access_log  /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log;
root   /usr/share/nginx/html;

# Serve static content statically
expires +30d;
location /static {
add_header Cache-control public;
root /usr/share/nginx/html/root/;
}

# We pass the rest to our FastCGI application server
location /  {
# We also set some headers to prevent proxies
add_header Pragma “no-cache”;
add_header Cache-control “no-cache, must-revalidate, private, no-store”;
expires -1s;

# Where our FastCGI app server is listening
fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:8100;

include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_NAME     /;
fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_script_name;
}
}

If the line with fastcgi_pass is the same as the fastcgi ip address then you should be in good shape.  The other thing to notice about the configuration above tis the location /static this forwards requests for static content directly through nginx without using cgi.  This creates less overhead and faster responses for things like images, css, and javascript.

More later, my kids are in the middle of a mean rendition of chop sticks.

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.

• And so they have: