Dancer Applications As CPAN Modules

Distributing modules via CPAN? A breeze. Distributing applications? Pretty easy too. Distributing web applications? Eeeh… that’s getting a little harder.

The main problem with web applications is that they are not only composed of Perl code, but also of configuration files, templates, images and whatnots, and those are a bit trickier to deal with. But, if you remember, that’s a problem I poked a while ago. The question is, is that enough?

Spoiler: for simple Dancer applications, it is!

As a guinea pig, I took my buzzword-compliant Markdown-based presentation app, which offer the added difficulty of requiring to be run over Twiggy. As it turns out, once all the application files have been nicely tucked under the distrubution /share directory, the main script turns out to be (relatively) straight-forward:

use strict;
use warnings;

use 5.10.0;

use File::ShareDir::Tarball;
use Getopt::Long;
use Path::Tiny;
use Plack::Loader;

require Dancer;

GetOptions( %::options,
    'appdir=s'
);

my $prez = shift;

$::options{appdir} &&= path($::options{appdir})->absolute;

$ENV{DANCER_APPDIR} = $::options{appdir} ||
    File::ShareDir::Tarball::dist_dir( 'App-Chorus' );

say "using appdir '$ENV{DANCER_APPDIR}'";

# dont' want Dancer to initialize before DANCER_APPDIR
# is set
Dancer->import;

Dancer::load_app( 'App::Chorus', settings => {
    logger          => 'console',
    log             => 'debug',
    presentation    => $prez,
    serializer      => 'JSON',
});

$ENV{PLACK_ENV} = 'PSGI';

Plack::Loader->load('Twiggy', port => 3000 )->run(Dancer::dance());

Yes, that’s it. We extract the application root dir on-the-fly, unless the user wants to use their own version (which open the door for customization and slight performance increase). And then we use the lovely magic of Plack::Loader to launch our web app over Twiggy.

And with that, Chorus is finally on CPAN (and on GitHub, of course). Enjoy!