There’s a few different posts out there on how to run Perl apps, such as Mojolicious-based, on Heroku, but I’d like to show how to deploy a Perl Dancer application on Heroku.
The startup script of a Dancer application (bin/app.pl) can be used as a PSGI file. With that in mind, I was able to take the good work of Miyagawa’sHeroku buildpack for general PSGI apps and hack it a little bit to use Dancer’s, specifically. What I like about Miyagawa’s approach is that uses the fantastic cpanm and makes it available within your application, instead of the monotonous cpan, to solve dependencies.
Let’s make a simple Dancer app to show how to make this happen:
/tmp $ dancer -a heroku
+ heroku
+ heroku/bin
+ heroku/bin/app.pl
+ heroku/config.yml
+ heroku/environments
+ heroku/environments/development.yml
+ heroku/environments/production.yml
+ heroku/views
+ heroku/views/index.tt
+ heroku/views/layouts
+ heroku/views/layouts/main.tt
+ heroku/MANIFEST.SKIP
+ heroku/lib
heroku/lib/
+ heroku/lib/heroku.pm
+ heroku/public
+ heroku/public/css
+ heroku/public/css/style.css
+ heroku/public/css/error.css
+ heroku/public/images
+ heroku/public/500.html
+ heroku/public/404.html
+ heroku/public/dispatch.fcgi
+ heroku/public/dispatch.cgi
+ heroku/public/javascripts
+ heroku/public/javascripts/jquery.js
+ heroku/t
+ heroku/t/002_index_route.t
+ heroku/t/001_base.t
+ heroku/Makefile.PL
Now, you already know that by firing perl bin/app.pl you can get your development server up and running. So I’ll just proceed to show how to make this work on Heroku, you should already have your development environment configured for it:
/tmp $ cd heroku/
/tmp/heroku $ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/heroku/.git/
/tmp/heroku :master $ git add .
/tmp/heroku :master $ git commit -a -m 'Dancer on Heroku'
[master (root-commit) 6c0c55a] Dancer on Heroku
22 files changed, 809 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
createmode100644 MANIFEST
createmode100644 MANIFEST.SKIP
createmode100644 Makefile.PL
createmode100755bin/app.pl
createmode100644 config.yml
createmode100644 environments/development.yml
createmode100644 environments/production.yml
createmode100644 lib/heroku.pm
createmode100644public/404.html
createmode100644public/500.html
createmode100644public/css/error.css
createmode100644public/css/style.css
createmode100755public/dispatch.cgi
createmode100755public/dispatch.fcgi
createmode100644public/favicon.ico
createmode100644public/images/perldancer-bg.jpg
createmode100644public/images/perldancer.jpg
createmode100644public/javascripts/jquery.js
createmode100644 t/001_base.t
createmode100644 t/002_index_route.t
createmode100644 views/index.tt
createmode100644 views/layouts/main.tt
/tmp/heroku :master $And now, run heroku create, please note the buildpack URL, http://github.com/damog/heroku-buildpack-perl.git:
/tmp/heroku :master $ heroku create --stack cedar --buildpack http://github.com/damog/heroku-buildpack-perl.git
Creating blazing-beach-7280... done, stack is cedar
http://blazing-beach-7280.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:blazing-beach-7280.git
Git remote heroku added
/tmp/heroku :master $
And just push:
/tmp/heroku :master $ git push heroku master
Counting objects: 34, done.
Delta compression using up to4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (30/30), done.
Writing objects: 100% (34/34), 40.60 KiB, done.
Total 34 (delta 3), reused 0 (delta 0)
-----> Heroku receiving push-----> Fetching custom buildpack... done-----> Perl/PSGI Dancer! app detected-----> Bootstrapping cpanm
Successfully installed JSON-PP-2.27200
Successfully installed CPAN-Meta-YAML-0.008
Successfully installed Parse-CPAN-Meta-1.4404 (upgraded from1.39)
Successfully installed version-0.99 (upgraded from0.77)
Successfully installed Module-Metadata-1.000009
Successfully installed CPAN-Meta-Requirements-2.122
Successfully installed CPAN-Meta-2.120921
Successfully installed Perl-OSType-1.002
Successfully installed ExtUtils-CBuilder-0.280205 (upgraded from0.2602)
Successfully installed ExtUtils-ParseXS-3.15 (upgraded from2.2002)
Successfully installed Module-Build-0.4001 (upgraded from0.340201)
Successfully installed App-cpanminus-1.501512 distributions installed
-----> Installing dependencies
Successfully installed ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.62 (upgraded from6.55_02)
Successfully installed YAML-0.84
Successfully installed Test-Simple-0.98 (upgraded from0.92)
Successfully installed Try-Tiny-0.11
Successfully installed HTTP-Server-Simple-0.44
Successfully installed HTTP-Server-Simple-PSGI-0.14
Successfully installed URI-1.60
Successfully installed Test-Tester-0.108
Successfully installed Test-NoWarnings-1.04
Successfully installed Test-Deep-0.110
Successfully installed LWP-MediaTypes-6.02
Successfully installed Encode-Locale-1.03
Successfully installed HTTP-Date-6.02
Successfully installed HTML-Tagset-3.20
Successfully installed HTML-Parser-3.69
Successfully installed Compress-Raw-Bzip2-2.052 (upgraded from2.020)
Successfully installed Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.054 (upgraded from2.020)
Successfully installed IO-Compress-2.052 (upgraded from2.020)
Successfully installed HTTP-Message-6.03
Successfully installed HTTP-Body-1.15
Successfully installed MIME-Types-1.35
Successfully installed HTTP-Negotiate-6.01
Successfully installed File-Listing-6.04
Successfully installed HTTP-Daemon-6.01
Successfully installed Net-HTTP-6.03
Successfully installed HTTP-Cookies-6.01
Successfully installed WWW-RobotRules-6.02
Successfully installed libwww-perl-6.04
Successfully installed Dancer-1.309729 distributions installed
-----> Installing Starman
Successfully installed Test-Requires-0.06
Successfully installed Hash-MultiValue-0.12
Successfully installed Devel-StackTrace-1.27
Successfully installed Test-SharedFork-0.20
Successfully installed Test-TCP-1.16
Successfully installed Class-Inspector-1.27
Successfully installed File-ShareDir-1.03
Successfully installed Filesys-Notify-Simple-0.08
Successfully installed Devel-StackTrace-AsHTML-0.11
Successfully installed Plack-0.9989
Successfully installed Net-Server-2.006
Successfully installed HTTP-Parser-XS-0.14
Successfully installed Data-Dump-1.21
Successfully installed Starman-0.300114 distributions installed
-----> Discovering process types
Procfile declares types -> (none)
Default types for Perl/PSGI Dancer! -> web
-----> Compiled slug size is 2.7MB-----> Launching... done, v4http://blazing-beach-7280.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku
To git@heroku.com:blazing-beach-7280.git
* [new branch] master -> master
/tmp/heroku :master $
And you can confirm it works:
Please note that the environment it runs on is “deployment”. The backend server it uses is the great Starman, also by the great Miyagawa.
Now, if you add or change dependencies on Makefile.PL, next time you push, those will get updated.
Very cool, right? :)