Day 5: Run a static web server with Plack

Plack distribution comes with some readymade PSGI applications in Plack::App namespace. Some of them might be pretty handy, and one example for that would be Plack::App::File and Plack::App::Directory.

Plack::App::File is to translate the request path, like /foo/bar.html into the local file, like /path/to/htdocs/foo/bar.html and opens the file handle and passes it back as a PSGI response. So that's basically what a static web server like lighttpd, nginx or Apache does.

Plack::App::Directory is a wrapper around Plack::App::File to give a directory index, just like Apache's mod_autoindex does.

Using those applications is pretty easy. Just write a .psgi file like this:

use Plack::App::File;
my $app = Plack::App::File->new(root => "$ENV{HOME}/public_html");

and run it with the plackup:

> plackup file.psgi

now you can get any files under your ~/public_html with the URL http://localhost:5000/somefile.html

You can also use Plack::App::Directory but this time with just the plackup command line, without a .psgi file, like this:

> plackup -MPlack::App::Directory \
 -e 'Plack::App::Directory->new(root => "$ENV{HOME}/Sites");
HTTP::Server::PSGI: Accepting connections at http://0:5000/

plackup command, like the perl command itself, accepts flags like -I (include path) -M (modules to load) and -e (the code to eval), so it's easy to load these Plack::App::* applications without even touching a .psgi file!

There is a couple other Plack::App applications in the Plack distribution but I'll save them for another Advent entry :)

Comments

[Mateu]

Small note. The Plack::App::Directory example is missing the closing single quote in order to be runnable.