How to develop and deploy Catalyst fastcgi apps with nginx and custom URIs? - perl

Question

Probably it's not so relevant, but I'll start with my environment: Linux OS, Perl 5.10, Catalyst 5.80032, nginx 1.0.11.
For the sake of the question, let's suppose I'm using mydomain.com on port 80 as an access point for the app's web page. Also let's use /var/www/mydomain as the physical location of my Catalyst application. In this case the static content is located at /var/www/mydomain/MyApp/root/.
I start the application as a fastcgi server (from MyApp/script):
> ./myapp_fastcgi.pl -l /tmp/myapp.socket -n 2 -p /tmp/myapp.pid -d
I start the nginx server with the following config:
server {
listen 127.0.0.1:80;
server_name mydomain.com;
location / {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/myapp.socket;
}
location /static {
root /var/www/mydomain/MyApp/root;
}
}
and everything seems to work fine when I access the app as http://mydomain.com/ or http://mydomain.com/products as another page (handled by MyApp::Controller::Products).
Now the challenge and the question: how should be nginx configured so it could serve applications' pages with an URI prefix (for example /some/prefix)?
In this case rootpage should be accessed as http://mydomain.com/some/prefix/ and the second one as http://mydomain.com/some/prefix/products.
The second part of the question is: how should be the application code modified in order to have valid URIs for redirects and all the pages? i.e. how $c->uri_for() and similar methods should be (re)written to have the same behavior for prefixed paths?
I have tried the dummy straightforward adjustment
location /some/prefix {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/myapp.socket;
}
but of course it doesn't work this way. So, I'm not able to get responses even to manually typed in URLs before moving to Perl code and play with redirects and URLs generation.

Answer 1

There is in nginx such directive like alias. It works this way:
If you have a url with value of http://my.domain.com/some/prefix/blabla.file and use alias directive with location directive as follows:
location /some/prefix {
alias /var/www/mydomain/MyApp/root;
}
The resulting url will be /var/www/mydomain/MyApp/blabla.file. Why? Because alias directive in location block use it's value (alias value) as temporary root for serving files and request and trim from request part matched in location so when request was /some/prefix/blabla.file here it will be only /blabla.file and when you add this to alias value then you will get what you want (if I understood you well).
According to our discusion belove in comments I can propose two things.
First, in nginx you can add such location block:
location ~ ^/some/prefix(.*)$ {
rewrite ^/some/prefix(.*)$ $1;
}
This directive will delete /some/prefix from /some/prefix/products and leave you only with /products. Next change your location block to looks like following one:
location / {
include fastcgi_params;
# Here you provide for your Catalys real uri which was orignally provided by user
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/myapp.socket;
}
So you set param REQUEST_URI for your Catalys to has value of user request without any modifications. In nginx are to variables $request_uri and $uri. Value of this first one never changes and of the second one changes everytime when it's, for example, rewrited by rewrite directive. Moreover this will work because location ~ has higher priority than just location / so request url will be always first trimed to only this what comes after /some/prefix pattern.
Will it be helpfull now?