Question

Is there a way to have one app in dancer but with multiple appdirs.

Or could I do something like this:

My project is in dir ‘foo’. And let’s say that I have a dir ‘bar’ (not inside ‘foo’) which has a directory called ‘public’. I what my app ‘foo’ to use this public as its own public and if it searches for let’s say ‘/css/style.css’ and it is not in ‘/bar/public/’ it should search the ‘/foo/public/’. How can I do that?

Answer 1

One of the ways if to write a plugin that renders static (and replaces some functionality). You can use Dancer::Plugin::Thumbnail as an example.

Other way I see is to monkey-patch get_file_response() at Dancer::Renderer which is not really such a good idea.

Following code looks for static files in each dir from @dirs array. It’s dirty, ugly and unsafe.
This can be broken in future version and may cause problems with other parts of Dancer framework I’m not familiar with. You’re warned.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Dancer;
use Dancer::Renderer;
use MyWeb::App;

my $get_file_response_original = \&Dancer::Renderer::get_file_response;
my @dirs = ('foo');

*Dancer::Renderer::get_file_response = sub {
    my $app = Dancer::App->current;

    my $result;

    # Try to find static in default dir
    if ($result = $get_file_response_original->(@_)) {
        return $result;
    }

    # Save current settings
    my $path_backup = $app->setting('public');

    # Go through additional dirs
    foreach my $dir (@dirs) {
        $app->setting(public => $dir);
        if ($result = $get_file_response_original->(@_)) {
            last;
        }
    }

    # Restore public
    $app->setting('public' => $path_backup);

    return $result
};

dance;

Third ways is to let nginx just do this work for you by writing proper nginx config for your application.