[Catalyst] re catinabox -- have you ever actually done this on a non-root server? Re: Catalyst Documentation

[Bill Moseley]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 01:05:51PM +0200, Thomas Hartman wrote:
> have you actually tried this on a shared (non root) server?

Yes, I have a Cat running on a Dreamhost machine.  It's a dedicated
server, but it's set up very similar to their shared machines, same
perl, installed modules, etc., AFAIK.

> CPAN kept saying, can't do this without sudo
> this, and asking me if I should install such and so dependency (even
> though I had follow turned on in my cpan config). Dependency hell.

Ya, it sucked when I did it, too.  I remember having this error early
on, but I seemed to have fixed it.

    You are not allowed to write to the directory
        '/usr/local/share/perl/5.8.4';

but that might be due to the fact that one of the first things I did
was to upgrade CPAN.pm.  I upgraded CPAN.pm because setting up
MyConfig.pm like the Calendar suggests didn't work.  Unfortunately,
upgrading CPAN.pm didn't solve the problem I was having.

The problem I was having was that Makefile.PL and Module::Build
packages are not handled the same by CPAN.pm and when install would
fail I'd have to go in and modify my MyConfig.pm.

I have in MyConfig.pm:

  # Swap these lines when CPAN pukes
   'makepl_arg' => q[INSTALLDIRS=site install_base=/home/moseley/local],
  # 'makepl_arg' => q[INSTALLDIRS=site PREFIX=/home/moseley/local],
  mbuildpl_install_arg => q[INSTALLDIRS=site install_base=/home/moseley/local],

So every so often CPAN would bomb saying install_base or PREFIX not
supported and I'd have to go edit MyConfig.pm.  I ended up
hand-installing quite a few modules instead of using CPAN.pm.


> Supposedly cpanplus improves things significantly, if you have the
> right linux kernel, if you have the right version of perl... if, if
> if. Eventually I just gave up.

Supposedly.  I tried cpanplus and has worse luck than with CPAN.

All this is crazy, of course.  For the vast majority of the modules I
needed to install all that needs to be done is have them copied to
the right location.  A single tarball with Catalyst and a big chuck
of the plugins could be installed with a single tar zf command in
about 10 seconds.

Cat-in-a-box is the way to go.  There just needs to be a "heavy"
version that contains the recommended dose of plugins and helper
modules.

Here's where my install stands now:

    $ find local -name \*.pm | wc -l
    1329

    $ du -sh local
    34M     local

    $ find local -type f | grep Catalyst | wc -l
    170

    $ find local -name \*.pm | grep Catalyst | wc -l
    65

    $ find local -name \*.pm | grep Plugin | wc -l
    68

I'll bet there's a big part of that my Cat application never touches.

If you want, email me off list and I'll tar it up for you.  You might
be able to just unpack it someplace and be ready to go.  Or it might
blow up.  It doesn't have DBIC, and I'm using my own versions of some
plugins installed in my lib directory, so it's not that "heavy"
version with everything installed.  But it might make installing what
extras you do need easier.


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org