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Catalyst-Plugin-Static-Simple-0.09
River stage two • 43 direct dependents • 61 total dependents
/ Catalyst::Plugin::Static::Simple

NAME

Catalyst::Plugin::Static::Simple - Make serving static pages painless.

SYNOPSIS

use Catalyst;
MyApp->setup( qw/Static::Simple/ );

DESCRIPTION

The Static::Simple plugin is designed to make serving static content in your application during development quick and easy, without requiring a single line of code from you.

It will detect static files used in your application by looking for file extensions in the URI. By default, you can simply load this plugin and it will immediately begin serving your static files with the correct MIME type. The light-weight MIME::Types module is used to map file extensions to IANA-registered MIME types.

Note that actions mapped to paths using periods (.) will still operate properly.

You may further tweak the operation by adding configuration options, described below.

ADVANCED CONFIGURATION

Configuration is completely optional and is specified within MyApp->config->{static}. If you use any of these options, the module will probably feel less "simple" to you!

Aborting request logging

Since Catalyst 5.50, there has been added support for dropping logging for a request. This is enabled by default for static files, as static requests tend to clutter the log output. However, if you want logging of static requests, you can enable it by setting MyApp->config->{static}->{no_logs} to 0.

Forcing directories into static mode

Define a list of top-level directories beneath your 'root' directory that should always be served in static mode. Regular expressions may be specified using qr//.

MyApp->config->{static}->{dirs} = [
    'static',
    qr/^(images|css)/,
];

Including additional directories

You may specify a list of directories in which to search for your static files. The directories will be searched in order and will return the first file found. Note that your root directory is not automatically added to the search path when you specify an include_path. You should use MyApp->config->{root} to add it.

MyApp->config->{static}->{include_path} = [
    '/path/to/overlay',
    \&incpath_generator,
    MyApp->config->{root}
];

With the above setting, a request for the file /images/logo.jpg will search for the following files, returning the first one found:

/path/to/overlay/images/logo.jpg
/dynamic/path/images/logo.jpg
/your/app/home/root/images/logo.jpg

The include path can contain a subroutine reference to dynamically return a list of available directories. This method will receive the $c object as a parameter and should return a reference to a list of directories. Errors can be reported using die(). This method will be called every time a file is requested that appears to be a static file (i.e. it has an extension).

For example:

sub incpath_generator {
    my $c = shift;
    
    if ( $c->session->{customer_dir} ) {
        return [ $c->session->{customer_dir} ];
    } else {
        die "No customer dir defined.";
    }
}

Ignoring certain types of files

There are some file types you may not wish to serve as static files. Most important in this category are your raw template files. By default, files with the extensions tt, html, and xhtml will be ignored by Static::Simple in the interest of security. If you wish to define your own extensions to ignore, use the ignore_extensions option:

MyApp->config->{static}->{ignore_extensions} = [ qw/tt html xhtml/ ];

Ignoring entire directories

To prevent an entire directory from being served statically, you can use the ignore_dirs option. This option contains a list of relative directory paths to ignore. If using include_path, the path will be checked against every included path.

MyApp->config->{static}->{ignore_dirs} = [ qw/tmpl css/ ];

For example, if combined with the above include_path setting, this ignore_dirs value will ignore the following directories if they exist:

/path/to/overlay/tmpl
/path/to/overlay/css
/dynamic/path/tmpl
/dynamic/path/css
/your/app/home/root/tmpl
/your/app/home/root/css

Custom MIME types

To override or add to the default MIME types set by the MIME::Types module, you may enter your own extension to MIME type mapping.

MyApp->config->{static}->{mime_types} = {
    jpg => 'image/jpg',
    png => 'image/png',
};

Apache integration and performance

Optionally, when running under mod_perl, Static::Simple can return DECLINED on static files to allow Apache to serve the file. A check is first done to make sure that Apache's DocumentRoot matches your Catalyst root, and that you are not using any custom MIME types or multiple roots. To enable the Apache support, you can set the following option.

MyApp->config->{static}->{use_apache} = 1;

By default this option is disabled because after several benchmarks it appears that just serving the file from Catalyst is the better option. On a 3K file, Catalyst appears to be around 25% faster, and is 42% faster on a 10K file. My benchmarking was done using the following 'siege' command, so other benchmarks would be welcome!

siege -u http://server/static/css/10K.css -b -t 1M -c 1

For best static performance, you should still serve your static files directly from Apache by defining a Location block similar to the following:

<Location /static>
    SetHandler default-handler
</Location>

Bypassing other plugins

This plugin checks for a static file in the prepare_action stage. If the request is for a static file, it will bypass all remaining prepare_action steps. This means that by placing Static::Simple before all other plugins, they will not execute when a static file is found. This can be helpful by skipping session cookie checks for example. Or, if you want some plugins to run even on static files, list them before Static::Simple.

Currently, work done by plugins in any other prepare method will execute normally.

Debugging information

Enable additional debugging information printed in the Catalyst log. This is automatically enabled when running Catalyst in -Debug mode.

MyApp->config->{static}->{debug} = 1;

SEE ALSO

Catalyst, Catalyst::Plugin::Static, http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/

AUTHOR

Andy Grundman, <andy@hybridized.org>

CONTRIBUTORS

Marcus Ramberg, <mramberg@cpan.org>

THANKS

The authors of Catalyst::Plugin::Static:

Sebastian Riedel
Christian Hansen
Marcus Ramberg

For the include_path code from Template Toolkit:

Andy Wardley

COPYRIGHT

This program is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.