Dispatching with Catalyst in FastCGI under Apache

Question

I am teaching myself Catalyst. I would very much like to organise my application with multiple controllers and multiple actions in each, and maybe try chains, but I am not sure how to make this work under my specific settings.

I have full control of the computer that runs the external FastCGI server, but I have no access whatsoever to the computer that runs Apache. The only way I can "configure" the server is by posting a support ticket, asking "Would you guys please try to add those couple lines to the Apache config?", and hoping for the best.

So far I have asked them to try this configuration:

Alias /myapp/ /tmp/myapp.fcgi
FastCgiExternalServer /tmp/myapp.fcgi -host myserver:3010

But of course, this works if someone connects to http://theirserver/myapp, but I cannot use http://theirserver/myapp/controller/action/etc with this configuration.

So here's my multipart question:

1. Is there an easy way to configure Apache in such a way that I would be able to use a better dispatch, and maybe even chains — i.e. not have one Alias for each possible controller–action?

2. In case that can't be done, that would mean only the query is available. What are best practices to dispatch a request in Catalyst under those circumstances?

Answer 1

I have found what is to me an acceptable solution, but I'm still looking for best practices in Apache configuration or Catalyst-as-external-FastCGI dispatch. By all means, answer the question if you know of a better way!

The module Catalyst::ActionRole::QueryParameter makes it possible to handle dispatching of requests based on query parameters. I have been able to use it to build a controller that looks like this:

package MyApp::Controller::Root;

use Moose;
use namespace::autoclean;

BEGIN { extends 'Catalyst::Controller::ActionRole'; }

__PACKAGE__->config(
    namespace    => '',
    action_roles => ['QueryParameter'],
);

sub default :Path {
  my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
  $c->response->body('no action specified!');
}

sub login :Path :QueryParam('action:eqlogin') {
    my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
    $c->response->body('login')
}

sub logout :Path :QueryParam('action:eqlogout') {
    my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
    $c->response->body('logout')
}

__PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable;

1;

It is even possible to use some sort of chains, as shown in the provided example application, although that doesn't seem nowhere as satisfactory as what I have read about in the manual.

At the time of writing this, string comparison doesn't work in this module, so using this solution probably means applying a small patch to QueryParameter.pm, as suggested in this bug report.