[Catalyst] Anyone actually using FastCGI with Apache (or even lighttpd)?

[Jason Kohles]

I've been struggling for a while now to get an app working under
FastCGI, mostly under Apache, although I did briefly experiment with
lighttpd, it gave me the same results.

In a nutshell, the problem is this, I setup an application using this
configuration (which I found in the documentation):

FastCgiExternalServer /tmp/test -socket /tmp/test.socket
<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName test.domain.com
        ServerAdmin webmaster at domain.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html

        Alias / /tmp/test/
</VirtualHost>

When running a Catalyst app with this configuration, what happens is
that any URL that is one level off the root, and ends with a / ends up
at the main controllers index method.  You can demonstrate this with a
very basic modification of a generic application, just use
'catalyst.pl Test' to create a test app, then put these two methods in
Controller::Root:

sub default : Private {
    my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
    $c->response->body( "This is default" );
}
sub index : Private {
    my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
    $c->response->body( "This is index" );
}

Loading this application as http://test.domain.com/ should return
'This is index', while any other url on the server should say 'This is
default'.  What happens however, is that if you request a URL such as
http://test.domain.com/foo/, you also get 'This is index'.

The reason for this is that Catalyst::Engine::FastCGI inherits from
Catalyst::Engine::CGI.  Catalyst::Engine::CGI::prepare_path() has this
code:

    $base_path = $ENV{SCRIPT_NAME} || '/';

When using the CGI interface, this works fine, and most of the time
this seems to work fine for FastCGI as well, except when you use URL
such as http://test.domain.com/foo/, what happens is that Apache (or
mod_fastcgi) sets up these environment variables as:

SCRIPT_NAME = '/foo'
PATH_INFO = '/'

Rather than the values you would expect them to have, which should be:

SCRIPT_NAME = '/'
PATH_INFO = '/foo'

This seems to be a fairly common problem (there are bugs that mention
similar behaviour in the bug tracking queues for lighttpd, rt, trac,
zope, and several others), although I haven't been able to find a
solution anywhere.

I'm trying to use fastcgi with the external server so that I can have
different apps using different perl installs for deployment purposes,
which is a lot trickier with mod_perl, although if I can't get this
working, I may have to bite the bullet and see about doing something
ugly with mod_perl to make it happen.

-- 
Jason Kohles
email at jasonkohles.com - http://www.jasonkohles.com/
"A witty saying proves nothing."  -- Voltaire