Three Perl cloud hosting platforms

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 by vti
Perl, hosting, cloud, PSGI, catalyst, dancer

Recently a lot of cloud hosting platforms started to appear. But most of them are either bound to a particular language or technology or have quite a limited Perl support. It is always a joy to see a new hosting company that supports my favorite language. And now we have even three alternatives!

Here is a simple application that we will try to deploy (complete source code examples are available on github, don't copy-n-paste it ;):

use strict;
use warnings;

use DateTime;

my $BIRTHDAY_DAY   = 23;
my $BIRTHDAY_MONTH = 7;

my $app = sub {
    my $env = shift;

    my $current_time = DateTime->now;

    my $body;
    if (   $current_time->day == $BIRTHDAY_DAY
        && $current_time->month == $BIRTHDAY_MONTH)
    {
        $body = 'Happy birthday!';
    }
    else {
        my $next_birthday = DateTime->new(
            year  => $current_time->year,
            month => $BIRTHDAY_MONTH,
            day   => $BIRTHDAY_DAY
        );

        $next_birthday += DateTime::Duration->new(years => 1)
          if $current_time > $next_birthday;

        my $diff = $next_birthday->subtract_datetime_absolute($current_time);

        $body =
          'Please, wait for just ' . $diff->in_units('seconds') . ' seconds.';
    }

    return [200, ['Content-Length' => length($body)], [$body]];
};

$app;

It just checks if today is my birthday and otherwise tells me how many seconds I should wait :)

dotCloud

First I tried http://dotcloud.com. You have to install a special Python-driven helper application that allows you to control your services and to deploy your applications. Actually any PSGI compliant application can be pushed.

Installing CLI

sudo easy_install pip && sudo pip install dotcloud

Configuring CLI

dotcloud

And enter you API key.

Preparing a project

Clone the project from https://github.com/vti/dotcloud-perl-example.

It should look smth like this:

dotcloud-perl-example
├── dotcloud.yml
└── mybirthday
    ├── app.psgi
    └── Makefile.PL

dotcloud.yml:

www:
    type: perl
    approot: mybirthday

Make sure you save PSGI app as app.psgi. We have dependencies, so we have to configure Makefile.PL. Official documentation http://docs.dotcloud.com/services/perl/ provides a sample Makefile.PL that looks like:

PREREQ_PM => {
    'Plack'    => 0.9974,
    'DateTime' => 0
},

But in reality it should be a complete Makefile.PL:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
WriteMakefile(
    PREREQ_PM => {
        'DateTime'       => 0,
        'Plack::Request' => '0.9976',
    },
);

Creating a service

dotcloud create mybirthday

Pushing an application

dotcloud push mybirthday dotcloud-perl-example

Deployment finished. Your application is available at the following URLs
www: http://ed3531d3.dotcloud.com/

If you face any problems just run dotcloud logs mybirthday.www and you will get all the logs. It is very easy to spot a problem.

More examples

ActiveState Stackato

Then I tried http://www.activestate.com/cloud platform. This is more like a personal cloud service. You get a virtual machine image with pre-setup components. An additional helper application is also available, but you can actually use a ssh client and run commands on the server. There are some tweaks with the network setup but they are well described on the documentation page.

Installing CLI

Download and put somewhere in your PATH stackato CLI application http://community.activestate.com/stackato/download.

Then download a Virtual Machine image from the same page. I've downloaded VirtualBox and had no problems.

Configuring CLI

Just follow the instructions at http://community.activestate.com/stackato/documentation/getstarted.

Preparing a project

Clone the project from https://github.com/vti/activestate-stackato-perl-example.

Our project should look smth like this:

activestate-stackato-perl-example
└── Makefile.PL
└── app.psgi

Where

Makefile.PL is the same for dotCloud
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
WriteMakefile(
    PREREQ_PM => {
        'DateTime'       => 0,
        'Plack::Request' => '0.9976',
    },
);
app.psgi is our application

Pushing an application

stackato push mybirthday

And then visit your applicaton localy, for example mybirthday.stackato.local.

More examples

Fluxflex

Recently I found http://www.fluxflex.com. Maybe it is not as powerful as previous solutions, but it doesn't require you to install any additional programs for pushing your apps, integrates with http://github.com and is very very very cheap. A good choice for simple and medium websites.

Preparing a project

Clone the project from https://github.com/vti/fluxflex-perl-example.

You can either create a new GitHub repository or just fork the link from above.

fluxflex-perl-example
├── extlib
└── public_html
    ├── .htaccess
    └── dispatch.fcgi

Where

extlib is a directory for our dependencies.
.htaccess
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi/$1 [QSA,L]
DirectoryIndex dispatch.fcgi index.html index.htm
dispatch.fcgi
#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Plack::Handler::FCGI;

my $app = sub {
    # our application
};

Plack::Handler::FCGI->new->run($app);

IMPORTANT! Do not forget to change dispatch.fcgi permissions to 755.

chmod +x public_html/dispatch.fcgi

Or you will waste a lot of time trying to figure out what's this all about:

Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi

Creating a service

Create a service online and connect to your GitHub project.

Pushing an application

Just a normal git push. Easy. The project will be updated automatically (or manually via deploy button).

git push

And then visit you application:

http://mybirthday.fluxflex.com/

More examples

What am I using?

Unfortunately none of them. My recent interests lie in real-time web applications that require WebSocket proxying. Available platforms are built on Nginx+uWSGI or Apache+FastCGI technologies and are not suitable without additional patching, hacking etc.

I hope this will be changed soon.

POD ERRORS

Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:

Around line 74:

Non-ASCII character seen before =encoding in '├──'. Assuming ISO8859-1

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