Catalyst

Notes on Catalyst, an MVC web framework for perl.

Installation

Other people's instructions

• Getting this to work on Dreamhost

On Dreamhost with perlbrew

Here, I am using perlbrew instead of the typical instructions, and hope to bypass the whole local::lib thing.

Presume that myperl is a perlbrew environment that's already been set up and that its executable is at

/home/someuser/perl5/perlbrew/perls/myperl/bin/perl

Install modules with cpanm:

perlbrew use myperl
cpanm Catalyst::Runtime Catalyst::Devel

Version check

Run the following, which always fails:

perl -M"Catalyst 999"

If the failure is about a version number, the install worked (and the error displays the version number). Otherwise, there was a problem.

Link catalyst.pl

Instructions and tutorials refer to the bootstrap script catalyst.pl. This is installed in the bin dir of the perlbrew environment:

/home/someuser/perl5/perlbrew/perls/myperl/bin/catalyst.pl

To make this less of a mouthful, make this accessible from your path. In this example, I'll qualify it with the name of the perlbrew env in case I want to set this up for multiple sites; anytime the doc says "catalyst.pl" I'll substitute "myperl-catalyst.pl".

ln -s /home/someuser/perl5/perlbrew/perls/myperl/bin/catalyst.pl ~/bin/myperl-catalyst.pl

Test on a site

Here, sub.example.com is a domain that has been set up with FastCGI enabled.

perlbrew use myperl
cd ~/sub.example.com
catalyst.pl Foo
# Lots of files are created
cd Foo
# This part corrects all the "/usr/bin/env perl" shebangs with the perlbrew perl
find -type f -exec perl -p -i -e 's!/usr/bin/env perl!/home/someuser/perl5/perlbrew/perls/myperl/bin/perl!g' {} \;
# "make sure your install is complete"
perl Makefile.PL

After this, visiting the page

http://sub.example.com/Foo/script/foo_cgi.pl

results in a simple "Page not found" message. (If the result is a 500, something wasn't set up correctly.)