Catalyst application under Apache2 mod_perl won't render Mason templates - perl

Question

my application root is /home/user/apps/learningcatalyst/CGAddressBook
in that folder I have a /mason folder where mason components are stored
my View is located in /lib/CGAddressBook/View where I have a few files called login_form and addressbook.
Couldn't render component "login_form" - error was "could not find component for initial path '/login_form' (component roots are: '/home/user/apps/learningcatalyst/CGAddressBook/lib/CGAddressBook/View')
is the error I get when trying to reach the site through Apache. My apache conf file is
PerlSwitches -I/home/user/apps/learningcatalyst/CGAddressBook/lib
PerlModule CGAddressBook
<Location /user_catalyst/>
SetHandler modperl
PerlResponseHandler CGAddressBook
</Location>
DocumentRoot /home/user/apps/learningcatalyst/CGAddressBook/root
<Location /user_catalyst/static>
SetHandler default-handler
</Location>
All folders are readable by user, its group, and other. The mason folder, where Mason is set to write its cache, is set to read, write, and execute by user, group, and other. Its owner is user.
I have restarted Apache to no avail, I have changed folder owners (and recursively) of both the /View and /mason.
The application works just fine when running script/cgaddressbook_server.pl -r -p3001 and I go to my site on port 3001.

Answer 1

The path to comp_root is meant to be the path to your template "components". You appear to be pointing it at the same directory as the "View" package. You "might" actually have the components there but that is not really a good practice.
The default location without specifying this should be the "root/comps" folder ( or something like that ) in your Catalyst project structure. One of my own samples is like this:
package SnakierTen::Web::View::HTML;
use Modern::Perl;
use Moose;
use MooseX::NonMoose;
extends 'Catalyst::View::Mason2';
around BUILDARGS => sub {
my ( $orig, $class, $c, #args ) = #_;
$class->config(
comp_root => $c->path_to( 'root' ),
data_dir => $c->path_to( 'data' ),
plugins => [
'TidyObjectFiles',
'HTMLFilters',
],
);
$class->$orig( $c, #args );
};
__PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable;
no Moose;
1;
Aside from that, direct support of Mod Perl handlers is being deprecated in Catalyst core.
The favored method is to start the application under it's own PSGI compliant server and use a "front end" web server to "proxy" the requests to this application server.
Where you must run the application under a mod_perl environment, it is still recommended to run under a PSGI handler. There are some notes here that are a part of the documentation yet to be built on this. You can use the methods there to guide you in doing this.