Howto deploy #Mojolicious to @dotcloud
—
After sending some tweets
with dotcloud I’ve figured out how to deploy Mojolicious to
dotcloud as a perl-worker.
The way I previously deployed was using the standard
perl service, with a uWSGI
frontend. The really cool thing about a perl-worker is that the mojo
web application is running persistently allowing it to:
- Handle more requests in parallel
- Use WebSockets
- Allow the mojo app to do other tasks periodically
do both sync/async in mojolicious)
Mojolicious and dotcloud.
So here is how I did it:
dotcloud.yml
This file is the build file used by dotcloud to figure out which services
to set up. Here is an example file that I use:
www:
type: perl-worker
config:
perl_version: v5.16.x
ports:
www: http
The “magical” config setting here is “ports”. This allow the perl-worker to
be accessible from the outside. Which port is given to you is then set in
the environment.yml
file created by dotcloud.
supervisord.conf
The next file to set up is supervisord.conf
file which tells dotcloud which application to run. Here the file I use:
[program:cool_app]
command = /home/dotcloud/current/script/dotcloud.sh
This simply tells Supervisor to execute the “command” once pushed to dotcloud.
The shell script then need to start your mojo app the right way. Here is the
content of “dotcloud.sh”:
#!/bin/sh
export ENVIRONMENT_FILE="/home/dotcloud/environment.yml";
export MOJO_LOG_LEVEL="info";
# export environment.yml as shell variables
$( perl -p -e's/:\s+/=/;s/^/export /' $ENVIRONMENT_FILE );
if [ "x$DOTCLOUD_PROJECT" = "xcool_app_test" ]; then
export MOJO_LOG_LEVEL="debug";
fi
exec /home/dotcloud/current/script/cool_app daemon --listen "http://*:$PORT_WWW";
The trick is to fetch the “PORT_WWW” variable from the environment.yml file
and then start the “cool_app” with the correct listen port. The “if” in the
middle is a trick I use to set the debug level once pushed to my test-instance.
It is not required.
Pushing the app to dotcloud
After creating the files above, your directory tree should look something like
this:
cool_app.conf # app config file
dotcloud.yml
lib/ # your mojo app
Makefile.PL # build file for your mojo app
public/ # mojo public files
script/cool_app # executable
script/dotcloud.sh # executable
supervisord.conf
t/ # perl unittests
lite app.
Run the commands below to create and push the app:
dotcloud create cool_app
dotcloud push cool_app
After this you should see something like this in the output from “dotcloud”:
Deployment finished. Your application is available at the following URLs
www: http://cool_app-username.dotcloud.com/
And then you’re done!
Other resources
The downside about this is that you can’t serve your static files directly
with nginx. To remove this “burden” from your mojo app, you should consider
setting up cloudflare in front of your application.
It’s a kick ass service for both DNS and content delivery.