With my Yancy documentation site built, with a custom landing page and a POD viewer, I just need to deploy the site. I could deploy the site using hypnotoad, Mojolicious's preforking server with hot deployment, but that would require me to have a server and keep it online. It'd be a lot better if I could just deploy a static website to Github like all the cool people are doing.

But to do that, I'd need to take my dynamic website and turn it into a static one, and that's impossible! Or is it? Why am I asking me, when I'm the one who wrote a way to do it: The Mojolicious export command.

Continue reading Day 19: You Only Export Twice...

Perl is well-known for its one-liners: short programs written as part of the command line invocation of the interpreter. Certainly every programmer or sysadmin has the need, from time to time, to do a quick one-off task programmatically. Such tasks can be done with a full script, to be sure, but once you get the hang of writing them, one-liners can save the time and hassle of actually doing so.

These tasks may include removing unwanted lines from files, collecting data from logs, or even a quick proof-of-concept of something that would become a script later. They can read lines in files, even multiple files, can operate on files in-place, can read from STDIN as a pipe. But while one-liners have been tools of the trade for these activities, certainly no such thing would be practical for web tasks, right?

But of course, on day 5 and day 6 of this series that we saw that we can build command line tools with your app. We have even seen how to use the eval command to run a one-liner against your app. So could we take this further?

Could we do remote data fetching and manipulation as a one-liner? Could we build an entire web application as a one-liner? Would I be asking if the answer was no?

Continue reading Day 23: One-Liners for Fun and Profit...

Everyone has written those one-off administration or check scripts. There are probably a few cluttering your project root or bin directory right now. Those have a problem beyond just the clutter: duplication.

Programmers hate duplication because of skew. If code gets improved in one place, it is unlikely to be improved in all places, unless there is only the one. So that script you wrote a while back, the one with the database connection you hand-rolled, is that still correct?

In the previous article in this series I talked about the built-in commands available to your application. The final command was eval. I mentioned that when combined with predefined behaviors, the command could be great for administrative tasks. That's true, but you need to know what to eval in order to do so.

To formalize that process, we can go one step further: defining our own commands. By doing this your application's administative behaviors can take arguemnts and provide optional switches as well as give usage messages. In this way these administative commands decouple themselves from knowledge of the application's internals and become useful to a broader set of users.

Continue reading Day 6: Adding Your Own Commands...

I mentioned at the outset of this series that Mojolicious applications are more than just web servers. I then showed how you can start a web server using the daemon or prefork commands. In the previous post, I mentioned an inflate command that can help you with growing your app from Lite to Full.

But there are other commands, built right in to your app, that can help you be more productive right away!

Continue reading Day 5: Your App's Built-In Commands...