HostingMasonAtDreamHost

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I recently started [http://www.vi.net/cloud-hosting/cloud-hosting.php cloud hosting] at dreamhost and I was unable to get it going using the standard CGIHandler scripts. So I had to bypass the CGIHandler and just use the Mason Interpreter.


By the way, HTML::Mason is NOT supported by dreamhost. Since the CPAN modules are installed on the shared host, I am assuming that we can use them.

I thought a basic setup might be useful to anyone else out there who was looking for cheap Mason Hosting.

Setup your .htaccess
[~/web]$ cat .htaccess
ErrorDocument 400 /mason_handler.cgi
ErrorDocument 403 /mason_handler.cgi
ErrorDocument 404 /mason_handler.cgi

DirectoryIndex index.html
Options -Indexes

<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

<FilesMatch "\.html$">
Action html-mason /mason_handler.cgi
SetHandler html-mason

Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch "(autohandler|dhandler)$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

Setup your mason handler

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Cwd;
use File::Path;
use File::Spec;
use HTML::Mason;

my $args = $ENV{'REQUEST_URI'} || '/index.html';
my $comp_root = File::Spec->rel2abs(cwd);
my $interp = HTML::Mason::Interp->new( comp_root => $comp_root );
$interp->exec($args);

exit 0;

Now just drop an autohandler, and a dhandler in the document root and you are ready to go.

Dreamhost also hosts FCGI, so you can set up your mason handler as a fcgi script. This also means you can set up a persistent database connection easily.

[~/web]$ cat .htaccess
ErrorDocument 400 /mason_handler.fcgi
ErrorDocument 403 /mason_handler.fcgi
ErrorDocument 404 /mason_handler.fcgi

DirectoryIndex index.html
Options -Indexes

<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

<FilesMatch "\.html$">
Action html-mason /mason_handler.fcgi
SetHandler html-mason

Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch "(autohandler|dhandler)$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

[~/web]$ cat mason_handler.fcgi
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use FCGI;
use Cwd;
use File::Path;
use File::Spec;
use HTML::Mason;

# Grab the FastCGI request
my $cgi = FCGI::Request();

# my globals
my $interp; # HTML::Mason::Interp
my $Dbh; # Global/persistent Database handle

while ( $cgi->Accept() >= 0 ) {
unless ($interp) {
# create Mason Component Interpreter
my $comp_root = File::Spec->rel2abs(cwd);
$interp = HTML::Mason::Interp->new( comp_root => $comp_root );
}
unless ($Dbh) {
# create Global Database handle
}

my $env = $cgi->GetEnvironment();
my $request = $env->{REQUEST_URI} || '/index.html';
$interp->exec($request, Dbh => $Dbh);
}

exit 0;