NAME¶
Catalyst::Manual::Deployment::Apache::mod_perl - Deploying Catalyst with
mod_perl
mod_perl Deployment¶
The recommended method of deploying Catalyst applications is FastCGI. In many
cases, mod_perl is not the best solution, but we'll list some pros and cons so
you can decide for yourself.
Pros¶
Speed
mod_perl is fast, and your entire app will be loaded in memory within each
Apache process.
Shared memory for multiple apps
If you need to run several Catalyst apps on the same server, mod_perl will share
the memory for common modules.
Cons¶
Memory usage
Since your application is fully loaded in memory, every Apache process will be
rather large. This means a large Apache process will be tied up while serving
static files, large files, or dealing with slow clients. For this reason, it
is best to run a two-tiered web architecture with a lightweight frontend
server passing dynamic requests to a large backend mod_perl server.
Reloading
Any changes made to the code of your app require a full restart of Apache.
Catalyst does not support Apache::Reload or StatINC. This is another good
reason to run a frontend web server where you can set up an
"ErrorDocument 502" page to report that your app is down for
maintenance.
Cannot run multiple versions of the same app
It is not possible to run two different versions of the same application in the
same Apache instance because the namespaces will collide.
Cannot run different versions of libraries
If you have two different applications which run on the same machine, and each
application needs a different versions of a library, the only way to do this
is to have per-vhost perl interpreters (with different library paths). This is
entirely possible, but nullifies all the memory sharing benefits that you get
from having multiple applications sharing the same interpreter.
Setup¶
Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about setting up mod_perl to
run a Catalyst app.
2. Install Apache with mod_perl¶
Both Apache 1.3 and Apache 2 are supported, although Apache 2 is highly
recommended. With Apache 2, make sure you are using the prefork MPM and not
the worker MPM. The reason for this is that many Perl modules are not
thread-safe and may have problems running within the threaded worker
environment. Catalyst is thread-safe however, so if you know what you're
doing, you may be able to run using worker.
In Debian, the following commands should get you going.
apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork
apt-get install libapache2-mod-perl2
Every Catalyst application will automagically become a mod_perl handler when run
within mod_perl. This makes the configuration extremely easy. Here is a basic
Apache 2 configuration.
PerlSwitches -I/var/www/MyApp/lib
PerlModule MyApp
<Location />
SetHandler modperl
PerlResponseHandler MyApp
</Location>
The most important line here is "PerlModule MyApp". This causes
mod_perl to preload your entire application into shared memory, including all
of your controller, model, and view classes and configuration. If you have
-Debug mode enabled, you will see the startup output scroll by when you first
start Apache.
Also, there have been reports that the block above should instead be (but this
has not been confirmed):
<Perl>
use lib '/var/www/MyApp/lib';
use MyApp;
</Perl>
<Location />
SetHandler modperl
PerlResponseHandler MyApp
</Location>
For an example Apache 1.3 configuration, please see the documentation for
Catalyst::Engine::Apache::MP13.
Test It¶
That's it, your app is now a full-fledged mod_perl application! Try it out by
going to
http://your.server.com/.
Other Options¶
Non-root location¶
You may not always want to run your app at the root of your server or virtual
host. In this case, it's a simple change to run at any non-root location of
your choice.
<Location /myapp>
SetHandler modperl
PerlResponseHandler MyApp
</Location>
When running this way, it is best to make use of the "uri_for" method
in Catalyst for constructing correct links.
Static file handling¶
Static files can be served directly by Apache for a performance boost.
DocumentRoot /var/www/MyApp/root
<Location /static>
SetHandler default-handler
</Location>
This will let all files within root/static be handled directly by Apache. In a
two-tiered setup, the frontend server should handle static files. The
configuration to do this on the frontend will vary.
Note the path of the application needs to be stated explicitly in the web server
configuration for this recipes.
AUTHORS¶
Catalyst Contributors, see Catalyst.pm
COPYRIGHT¶
This library is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.