Pre-forking Dancer app on CentOS

Question

I have a prototype application (RESTful web service database front-end) that is written using Dancer. As a prototype this runs fine under Apache with mod_proxy, and Dancer's routes work really nice.

My next step is to see if I can get this to scale a bit as some of the queries can be very slow and I don't want the slow queries blocking other requests.

I'd like to use rpms to manage the needed perl modules. For Dancer, this is no problem as CentOS-6 plus EPEL provide sufficient rpms to allow me to build/install Dancer and Dancer::Plugin::Database rpms. Trying to build Plack rpms isn't working nearly as well however due to a varietly of reasons, one of which is that some of the system modules are too low a version number (and no, overwriting the system rpms with higher version local builds is not considered an option).

EPEL does provide rpms for CGI::Emulate::PSGI and HTTP::Server::Simple::PSGI but I'm not seeing how to wrangle either one of them into a desired solution.

So, my question is: Is there a clean/maintainable way to get Dancer running on CentOS-6 with pre-forking? Barring that, how does one get Apache to play nicely with a local perl install (where I can use tools like cpanm to install things)?

Answer 1

I highly recommend you the use of perlbrew, and forget the system perl.

Answer 2

If you want to restrict yourself to the packages shipped with CentOS, then you can run your Dancer app under mod_perl. There is a Plack adapter for mod_perl, so it is rather straightforward.

For example

<Location /myapp>
  SetHandler perl-script
  PerlHandler Plack::Handler::Apache2
  PerlSetVar psgi_app /var/www/html/myapp.example.com/app.psgi
</Location>