On OpenBSD we have a package management system that allows us to get ready a fully-fledged Catalyst environment quite easily and fast.

There are two possible ways to achieve this but this article sticks to the officially recommended one: packages. The other route would be the ports collection but that's a different story.

Given you have installed OpenBSD 4.4, the first thing before you can start is to pick a mirror near you from http://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html. I use my favorite mirror in this article, which is located in Europe/Germany, quite fast and up to date: ftp://ftp.de.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/.

Now you need to append the path to the package directory. In my case - using amd64 - that is 4.4/packages/amd64. For i386, macppc and so on just replace the architecture with the one you're using.

With the mirror and the package directory we have the complete URL pointing to ftp://ftp.de.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.4/packages/amd64 which we put in the PKG_PATH environment variable.

What you should enter in your terminal (assuming a korn-like shell) is:

  $ export PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.de.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.4/packages/amd64
  $

To save you from repeating that in the future, just put it into the shell profile (~/.profile for ksh).

Further I will assume you're in the wheel group so you can run sudo.

Now use pkg_info to easily find all the packages having Catalyst in their name:

  $ pkg_info -Q Catalyst
  p5-Catalyst-Action-RenderView-0.08.tgz
  p5-Catalyst-Authentication-Store-DBIx-Class-0.104.tgz
  p5-Catalyst-Controller-FormBuilder-0.04.tgz
  p5-Catalyst-Controller-Rose-0.02.tgz
  p5-Catalyst-Devel-1.08.tgz
  p5-Catalyst-Engine-Apache-1.12.tgz
  ...
  p5-Catalyst-View-TT-0.27.tgz
  p5-Catalyst-View-TT-ForceUTF8-0.06.tgz
  p5-Catalyst-View-TT-FunctionGenerator-0.01.tgz
  p5-Catalyst-View-XSLT-0.04.tgz
  p5-Test-WWW-Mechanize-Catalyst-0.42.tgz
  $

We see p5-Catalyst-Devel in the list and proceed to install it:

  $ sudo pkg_add p5-Catalyst-Devel
  p5-Class-Accessor-0.31: complete
  p5-Config-General-2.36: complete
  p5-File-Copy-Recursive-0.36: complete
  p5-Module-Install-0.67:p5-ExtUtils-CBuilder-0.18: complete
  ...
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-ConfigLoader-0.20: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Static-Simple-0.20:p5-MIME-Types-1.24: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Static-Simple-0.20: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Devel-1.08: complete
  $

... done, wasn't that easy?! We have everything we need for the Catalyst base system.

For session support we install the session plugin, the file store and cookie state modules:

  $ sudo pkg_add p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-Store-File p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-State-Cookie
  p5-Error-0.17009: complete
  p5-IPC-ShareLite-0.09p0: complete
  p5-Digest-SHA1-2.11p0: complete
  p5-Cache-Cache-1.05: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-0.19:p5-Object-Signature-1.05p1: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-0.19: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-Store-File-0.13: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-State-Cookie-0.09: complete
  $

Let's assume we want the application to also use the authentication plugin too:

  $ sudo pkg_add p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Authentication
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Authentication-0.10006: complete
  $

... and DBIx::Class as the authentication store:

  $ sudo pkg_add p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Authentication-Store-DBIC
  p5-JSON-2.10: complete
  p5-DBI-1.604:p5-Net-Daemon-0.43: complete
  p5-DBI-1.604:p5-PlRPC-0.2018p0: complete
  p5-DBI-1.604: complete
  ...
  p5-Set-Object-1.22: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Authorization-Roles-0.05p1:p5-Universal-isa-0.06p1: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Authorization-Roles-0.05p1: complete
  p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Authentication-Store-DBIC-0.07p1: complete
  $

Now everything is installed and we can start to develop...

To create a new Catalyst application, using the infamous name MyApp, we type:

  $ catalyst.pl MyApp
  created "MyApp"
  created "MyApp/script"
  created "MyApp/lib"
  created "MyApp/root"
  ...
  created "MyApp/script/myapp_fastcgi.pl"
  created "MyApp/script/myapp_server.pl"
  created "MyApp/script/myapp_test.pl"
  created "MyApp/script/myapp_create.pl"
  $

Then change to the directory ...

  $ cd MyApp
  $

... and start the local server:

  $ ./script/myapp_server.pl
  [debug] Debug messages enabled
  [debug] Statistics enabled
  [debug] Loaded plugins:
  ...

  [info] MyApp powered by Catalyst 5.7014
  You can connect to your server at http://127.0.0.1:3000

Now you can connect to http://127.0.0.1:3000 and see the Catalyst welcome page.

This is the point you can start implementing whatever nice application you want.

After some time you surely want to make your application accessible to others.

As OpenBSD already comes with an httpd capable to handle all of this you only need to configure it appropriately. Using FastCGI is quite an efficient option, so we should install mod_fastcgi, the FCGI module and FCGI::ProcManager:

  $ sudo pkg_add mod_fastcgi fcgi p5-FCGI-ProcManager
  mod_fastcgi-2.4.2p2: complete
  fcgi-2.4.0p3: complete
  p5-FCGI-ProcManager-0.18: complete
  --- mod_fastcgi-2.4.2p2 -------------------
  To finish the install of mod_fastcgi, you need
  to enable the module using the following command

    /usr/local/sbin/mod_fastcgi-enable

  If you already have Apache running on your machine,
  you should not use "apachectl restart" - instead,
  you should fully stop and then restart the server.
  $

To enable mod_fastcgi we just need to type:

  $ sudo /usr/local/sbin/mod_fastcgi-enable
  Enabling  module...
  [activating module `fastcgi' in /var/www/conf/httpd.conf]
  cp /usr/local/lib/mod_fastcgi.so /usr/lib/apache/modules/mod_fastcgi.so
  chmod 755 /usr/lib/apache/modules/mod_fastcgi.so
  cp /var/www/conf/httpd.conf /var/www/conf/httpd.conf.bak
  cp /var/www/conf/httpd.conf.new /var/www/conf/httpd.conf
  rm /var/www/conf/httpd.conf.new
  $

Then, in /var/www/conf/httpd.conf we configure FastCGI as follows:

  FastCgiExternalServer /myapp -socket /tmp/myapp.socket

  Alias / /myapp/

Stop and start the server to load mod_fastcgi:

  $ sudo apachectl stop
  /usr/sbin/apachectl stop: httpd stopped
  $ sudo apachectl start
  /usr/sbin/apachectl start: httpd started
  $

The last thing we need to do is running script/myapp_fastcgi.pl.

One thing is important here: the httpd on OpenBSD is running in a change root environment per default, which is rooted at /var/www.

So the path to the socket specified in the httpd.conf is relative to this, which means the actual path to the socket is /var/www/tmp/myapp.socket.

First we create a tmp directory below /var/www:

  $ sudo mkdir -m 1777 /var/www/tmp

And now we start the fastcgi process(es):

  $ ./script/myapp_fastcgi.pl -l /var/www/tmp/myapp.socket
  ...
  FastCGI: manager (pid 277): initialized
  FastCGI: manager (pid 277): server (pid 31335) started
  FastCGI: server (pid 31335): initialized

Connect to your server address and see the application running there.

One thing is recommended though, the static files should be served by the webserver, not your Catalyst application.

Given you've put the application into the change root environment to /var/www/MyApp you need to add the following to the httpd.conf before the Alias directive mapping the FastCGI application:

  Alias /static/ /MyApp/root/static/

Congratulations, your deployment should be generally ready for prime time.

Simon 'janus' Bertrang <simon.bertrang@puzzworks.com>