Set perl cgi query_string offline - perl

I'd like to write some unit tests for my cgi script. I wrote my script as a modulino (script which could be a module depending on context) and I would like to test its functionality but also make sure that all parameters in query_string are set as they should.
I'd tried doing something like this:
$ENV{'QUERY_STRING'} = 'param1=some_param';
my $cgi = CGI->new;
print "param1= ".$cgi->param("param1")."\n";
But it seems to be completely ignoring that. Is there a way to set a query string without actually doing GET method?

You can use command line arguments with CGI.pm.
$ index.pl param1=some_param foo=bar
Those will show up in the script. But that is still inconvenient for unittesting your application. If there is a webserver there anyway, you can use Test::WWW::Mechanize.

I think I have found a solution:
$ENV{QUERY_STRING} = 'engine=sample';
$ENV{REQUEST_METHOD} = 'GET';
$ENV{GATEWAY_INTERFACE} = 'CGI/1.1';
Apparentely $ENV{QUERY_STRING} is not enough for this to work.

Related

Dancer2 strange behaviour on get protocol

I'm building a webapp using dancer2 as backend tool. I've implemented the main method as follow:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Dancer2;
get '/mything/:text' => sub {
my #myArray = ("");
# Fill the array with DB data;
return join "<br>", #myArray;
};
dance;
Everything is fine until the second time get method is used. Insted of #myArray being empty, its filled with the from the first execution.
As a dirty fix, I initialize #myArray to ("") at the end of the method, but I think that is ugly. Have you any experience on this?
To test this, I expanded your code into the following:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Dancer2;
get '/mything/:text' => sub {
my #myArray = localtime;
# Fill the array with DB data;
return join "<br>", #myArray;
};
dance;
Using localtime() was the easiest way I could think of to get a (slightly) different array each time I make a request (assume I don't make more than one request a second).
And that works exactly as I expected. I run plackup app.psgi and visit http://localhost:5000/mything/foo and I see the array I expect. When I refresh the page I get a different array.
So Dancer works as I would expect it to. If you're seeing different behaviour, it's because you're doing something different. And we can't really help you to work out what that is until we see more of your code.
Problem was related to not using perl in strict mode. The code as it was, was working properly in OSX 11.1 but not in Ubuntu 16.04. So after some tests, I found that some variables that I use to fill the array from the DB weren't properly initialized. After initialize them, everything is working as it should in OSX and Ubuntu.

Accessing subs from a require'd perl script

I'm going to import some perl code with the require statement. The code I'd like to import is in mylibA.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
package FOO::BAR;
sub routine {
print "A message!\n";
}
and mylibB.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
package FOO::BAZ;
sub routine {
print "Another message!\n";
}
Then I'm going to use it like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
foreach my $lib (qw/ mylibA.pl mylibB.pl /){
require $lib;
print "Make a call to ${lib}'s &routine!\n";
}
Is there a way for my script to figure out the namespace that was pulled in with the require statement?
Wow. I have to say this is the one of the most interesting Perl questions I've seen in a while. On the surface this seems like a very simple request - get an included module's namespace, but there really is no way to do this. You can get it while in the package, but not from outside the package. I tried using EXPORT to send the local package name back to the caller script but that ended up going nowhere given the difference in how "use" and "require" work. A more module type of approach probably would have worked with a "use" statement, but the requirement that the required script be able to run by themselves prevented that approach. The only thing left to do was to directly pollute the caller's namespace and hope for the best (assume that the caller had no package namespace) - something that modules are designed to prevent.
BTW - I can't believe this actually works - in strict mode, no less.
caller.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
#package SomePackageName; #if you enable this then this will fail to work
our $ExportedPackageName;
print "Current package=".__PACKAGE__."\n";
foreach my $lib (qw/ mylibA.pl mylibB.pl /){
require $lib;
print "Make a call to ${lib}'s &routine!\n";
print "Package name exported=".$ExportedPackageName."\n";
$ExportedPackageName->routine;
} #end foreach
print "Normal Exit";
exit;
__END__
mylibA.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
package FOO::BAR;
use strict;
#better hope the caller does not have a package namespace
$main::ExportedPackageName=__PACKAGE__;
sub routine {
print "A message from ".__PACKAGE__."!\n";
}
1;
mylibB.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
package FOO::BAZ;
use strict;
#better hope the caller does not have a package namespace
$main::ExportedPackageName=__PACKAGE__;
sub routine {
print "Another message, this time from ".__PACKAGE__."!\n";
}
1;
Result:
c:\Perl>
c:\Perl>perl caller.pl
Current package=main
Make a call to mylibA.pl's &routine!
Package name exported=FOO::BAR
A message from FOO::BAR!
Make a call to mylibB.pl's &routine!
Package name exported=FOO::BAZ
Another message, this time from FOO::BAZ!
Normal Exit
Regarding the mostly academical problem of finding the package(s) in a perl source file:
You can try the CPAN module Module::Extract::Namespaces to get all packages within a perl file. It is using PPI and is thus not 100% perfect, but most of the time good enough:
perl -MModule::Extract::Namespaces -e 'warn join ",", Module::Extract::Namespaces->from_file(shift)' /path/to/foo.pm
But PPI can be slow for large files.
You can try to compare the active packages before and after the require. This is also not perfect, because if your perl library file loads additional modules then you cannot tell which is the package of the prinicipal file and what's loaded later. To get the list of packages you can use for example Devel::Symdump. Here's a sample script:
use Devel::Symdump;
my %before = map { ($_,1) } Devel::Symdump->rnew->packages;
require "/path/to/foo.pm";
my %after = map { ($_,1) } Devel::Symdump->rnew->packages;
delete $after{$_} for keys %before;
print join(",", keys %after), "\n";
You can also just parse the perl file for "package" declarations. Actually, that's what the PAUSE upload daemon is doing, so it's probably "good enough" for most cases. Look at the subroutine packages_per_pmfile in
https://github.com/andk/pause/blob/master/lib/PAUSE/pmfile.pm
There are two problems here:
How do I change the behaviour of a script when executed as a standalone and when used as a module?
How do I discover the package name of a piece of code I just compiled?
The general answer to question 2 is: You don't, as any compilation unit may contain an arbitrary number of packages.
Anyway, here are three possible solutions:
Name your modules so that you already know the name when you load it.
Have each module register itself at a central rendezvous point.
Like #1, but adds autodiscovery of your plugins.
The simplest solution is to put all of the API in an ordinary module, and put the standalone logic in a seperate script:
/the/location/
Module/
A.pm
B.pm
a-standalone.pl
b-standalone.pl
Where each standalone basically looks like
use Module::A;
Module::A->run();
If another script wants to reuse that code, it does
use lib "/the/location";
use Module::A;
...
If the loading happens on runtime, then Module::Runtime helps here:
use Module::Runtime 'use_module';
use lib "/the/location";
my $mod_a = use_module('Module::A');
$mod_a->run();
It isn't strictly necessary to place the contents of a-standalone.pl and Module/A.pm into separate files, although that is clearer. If you want to conditionally run code in a module only if it is used as a script, you can utilize the unless(caller) trick.
Of course all of this is tricksing: Here we determine the file name from the module name, not the other way round – which as I already mentioned we cannot do.
What we can do is have each module register itself at a certain predefined location, e.g. by
Rendezvous::Point->register(__FILE__ => __PACKAGE__);
Of course the standalone version has to shield against the possibility that there is no Rendezvous::Point, therefore:
if (my $register = Rendezvous::Point->can("register")) {
$register->(__FILE__ => __PACKAGE__);
}
Eh, this is silly and violates DRY. So let's create a Rendezvous::Point module that takes care of this:
In /the/location/Rendezvous/Point.pm:
package Rendezvous::Point;
use strict; use warnings;
my %modules_by_filename;
sub get {
my ($class, $name) = #_;
$modules_by_filename{$name};
}
sub register {
my ($file, $package) = #_;
$modules_by_filename{$file} = $package;
}
sub import {
my ($class) = #_;
$class->register(caller());
}
Now, use Rendezvous::Point; registers the calling package, and the module name can be retrived by the absolute path.
The script that wants to use the various modules now does:
use "/the/location";
use Rendezvous::Point (); # avoid registering ourself
my $prefix = "/the/location";
for my $filename (map "$prefix/$_", qw(Module/A.pm Module/B.pm)) {
require $filename;
my $module = Rendezvous::Point->get($filename)
// die "$filename didn't register itself at the Rendezvous::Point";
$module->run();
}
Then there are fully featured plugin systems like Module::Pluggable. This system works by looking at all paths were Perl modules may reside, and loads them if they have a certain prefix. A solution with that would look like:
/the/location/
MyClass.pm
MyClass/
Plugin/
A.pm
B.pm
a-standalone.pl
b-standalone.pl
Everything is just like with the first solution: Standalone scripts look like
use lib "/the/location/";
use MyClass::Plugin::A;
MyClass::Plugin::A->run;
But MyClass.pm looks like:
package MyClass;
use Module::Pluggable require => 1; # we can now query plugins like MyClass->plugins
sub run {
# Woo, magic! Works with inner packages as well!
for my $plugin (MyClass->plugins) {
$plugin->run();
}
}
Of course, this still requires a specific naming scheme, but it auto-discovers possible plugins.
As mentioned before it is not possible to look up the namespace of a 'required' package without extra I/O, guessing or assuming.
Like Rick said before, one have to intrude the namespace of the caller or better 'main'. I prefer to inject specific hooks within a BEGIN block of the 'required' package.
#VENDOR/App/SocketServer/Protocol/NTP.pm
package VENDOR::App::SocketServer::Protocol::NTP;
BEGIN {
no warnings;
*main::HANDLE_REQUEST = \&HANDLE_REQUEST;
}
sub HANDLE_REQUEST {
}
#VENDOR/App/SocketServer.pm
my $userPackage= $ARGV[0];
require $userPackage;
main::HANDLE_REQUEST();
Instead of *main:: you can get more specific with *main::HOOKS::HANDLE_REQUESTS i.e. This enables you to resolve all injected hooks easily within the caller by iterating over the HOOK's namespace portion.
foreach my $hooks( keys %main::HOOKS ) {
}

Clash Between Multiple Locales in a mod_perl Setting?

I'm currently working on internationalizing a large Perl/Mason web application (Perl 5.8.0, Mason 1.48, mod_perl & Apache). In choosing a localization module, I decided to go with Locale::TextDomain over Locale::Maketext, mostly because the latter's plural form support isn't as nice as I'd like.
The hang-up I'm having with Locale::TextDomain is that it resolves which catalog to use for translations based on the process' locale. When I realized this, I got worried about how this would affect my application if I wanted users to be able to use different locales -- would it be possible that a change in locale to suit one user's settings would affect another user's session? For example, could there be a situation in which an English user received a page in German because a German user's session changed the process' locale? I'm not very knowledgeable about how Apache's thread/process model works, though it seems that if multiple users can be served by the same thread, this could happen.
This email thread would indicate that this is possible; here the OP describes the situation I'm thinking about.
If this is true, is there a way I can prevent this scenario while still using Locale::TextDomain? I suppose I could always hack at the module to load the catalogs in a locale-independent (probably using DBD::PO), but hopefully I'm just missing something that will solve my problem...
You entirely avoid the setlocale problems by using web_set_locale instead.
(That message on the mailing list predates the addition of that function by about 4 years.)
Edit: You are correct that global behaviour persists in Apache children, leading to buggy behaviour.
I wrote up a test case:
app.psgi
use 5.010;
use strictures;
use Foo::Bar qw(run);
my $app = sub {
my ($env) = #_;
run($env);
};
Foo/Bar.pm
package Foo::Bar;
use 5.010;
use strictures;
use Encode qw(encode);
use File::Basename qw(basename);
use Locale::TextDomain __PACKAGE__, '/tmp/Foo-Bar/share/locale';
use Locale::Util qw(web_set_locale);
use Plack::Request qw();
use Sub::Exporter -setup => { exports => [ 'run' ] };
our $DEFAULT_LANGUAGE = 'en'; # untranslated source strings
sub run {
my ($env) = #_;
my $req = Plack::Request->new($env);
web_set_locale($env->{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE}, undef, undef, [
map { basename $_ } grep { -d } glob '/tmp/Foo-Bar/share/locale/*'
]); # XXX here
return $req
->new_response(
200,
['Content-Type' => 'text/plain; charset=UTF-8'],
[encode('UTF-8', __ 'Hello, world!')],
)->finalize;
}
The app runs as a PerlResponseHandler. When the user request a language that cannot be set, the call fails silently and the language that was used last successfully is still enabled.
The trick to fix this is to always set to a language that exists with a fallback mechanism. At the spot marked XXX, add the code or web_set_locale($DEFAULT_LANGUAGE), so that despite using a global setting, the behaviour cannot persist because we guarantee that it is set/changed once per request.
Edit 2: Further testing reveals that it's not thread-safe, sorry. Use the prefork MPM only which isolates requests as processes; however worker and event are affected because they are thread-based.

Perl module loading - Safeguarding against: perhaps you forgot to load "Bla"?

When you run perl -e "Bla->new", you get this well-known error:
Can't locate object method "new" via package "Bla"
(perhaps you forgot to load "Bla"?)
Happened in a Perl server process the other day due to an oversight of mine. There are multiple scripts, and most of them have the proper use statements in place. But there was one script that was doing Bla->new in sub blub at line 123 but missing a use Bla at the top, and when it was hit by a click without any of the other scripts using Bla having been loaded by the server process before, then bang!
Testing the script in isolation would be the obvious way to safeguard against this particular mistake, but alas the code is dependent upon a humungous environment. Do you know of another way to safeguard against this oversight?
Here's one example how PPI (despite its merits) is limited in its view on Perl:
use strict;
use HTTP::Request::Common;
my $req = GET 'http://www.example.com';
$req->headers->push_header( Bla => time );
my $au=Auweia->new;
__END__
PPI::Token::Symbol '$req'
PPI::Token::Operator '->'
PPI::Token::Word 'headers'
PPI::Token::Operator '->'
PPI::Token::Word 'push_header'
PPI::Token::Symbol '$au'
PPI::Token::Operator '='
PPI::Token::Word 'Auweia'
PPI::Token::Operator '->'
PPI::Token::Word 'new'
Setting the header and assigning the Auweia->new parse the same. So I'm not sure how you can build upon such a shaky foundation. I think the problem is that Auweia could also be a subroutine; perl.exe cannot tell until runtime.
Further Update
Okay, from #Schwern's instructive comments below I learnt that PPI is just a tokenizer, and you can build upon it if you accept its limitations.
Testing is the only answer worth the effort. If the code contains mistakes like forgetting to load a class, it probably contains other mistakes. Whatever the obstacles, make it testable. Otherwise you're patching a sieve.
That said, you have two options. You can use Class::Autouse which will try to load a module if it isn't already loaded. It's handy, but because it affects the entire process it can have unintended effects.
Or you can use PPI to scan your code and find all the class method calls. PPI::Dumper is very handy to understand how PPI sees Perl.
use strict;
use warnings;
use PPI;
use PPI::Dumper;
my $file = shift;
my $doc = PPI::Document->new($file);
# How PPI sees a class method call.
# PPI::Token::Word 'Class'
# PPI::Token::Operator '->'
# PPI::Token::Word 'method'
$doc->find( sub {
my($node, $class) = #_;
# First we want a word
return 0 unless $class->isa("PPI::Token::Word");
# It's not a class, it's actually a method call.
return 0 if $class->method_call;
my $class_name = $class->literal;
# Next to it is a -> operator
my $op = $class->snext_sibling or return 0;
return 0 unless $op->isa("PPI::Token::Operator") and $op->content eq '->';
# And then another word which PPI identifies as a method call.
my $method = $op->snext_sibling or return 0;
return 0 unless $method->isa("PPI::Token::Word") and $method->method_call;
my $method_name = $method->literal;
printf "$class->$method_name seen at %s line %d.\n", $file, $class->line_number;
});
You don't say what server enviroment you're running under, but from what you say it sounds like you could do with preloading all your modules in advance before executing any individual pages. Not only would this prevent the problems you're describing (where every script has to remember to load all the modules it uses) but it would also save you memory.
In pre-forking servers (as is commonly used with mod_perl and Apache) you really want to load as much of your code before your server forks for the first time so that the code is stored once in copy-on-write shared memory rather than mulitple times in each child process when it is loaded on demand.
For information on pre-loading in Apache, see the section of Practical mod_perl

Curl Perl module not working, formadd method missing

I want to use following script:
use FileHandle;
use WWW::Curl::Easy;
use WWW::Curl::Form;
my $file, my $curl, my $curlf, my $return, my $minified;
$file = new FileHandle();
$curl = new WWW::Curl::Easy();
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_URL, "http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/compile");
$curlf = new WWW::Curl::Form();
$curlf->formadd('output_format', 'text');
$curlf->formadd('output_info', 'compiled_code');
$curlf->formadd('compilation_level', 'ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS');
$curlf->formaddfile($name, 'js_code', 'multipart/form-data');
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_HTTPPOST, $curlf);
$file->open(\$minified, ">");
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_WRITEDATA, $file);
$return = $curl->perform();
Following error is thrown:
Can't locate object method "formadd" via package "WWW::Curl::Form" at ./minifyjs.pl ....
WHY??? The WWW::Curl module is installed properly, I used package libwww-curl-perl under Debian/Ubuntu.
Can anyone help me please?
Whoops.
Looks like this commit broke formadd. The XS sub doesn't match the PREFIX = curl_form_ declaration (as it's named curl_formadd), so perl doesn't know how to map the Perl version of the method back to XS.
4.12 was the first release that tried to support WWW::Curl::Form, looks like it didn't work after all. Not sure how I've missed this one. I should probably note it here that WWW::Curl::Form support wasn't exactly a high priority TODO item on my list, due to the existence of various high quality form handling modules on CPAN. I've only accepted the patch for the sake of feature completeness. You're encouraged to use those modules for managing form content. The standard WWW::Curl use case statement applies.
I released 4.13 to fix this issue. Good catch!
Check out WWW::Mechanize. It has a lot of nice form methods.