Time for an application portfolio

[talexb]

I have been tinkering with a few tools lately, and now want to put up a portfolio of some web applications that I am working on. I have an account on pair Networks (they also host this site), so I set up local::lib and went ahead and tried to install Mojolicious::Lite, since that's the platform I'm working on these days.

No dice -- Mojo::Lite requires 5.10, and pair only has 5.8.9. I checked with the other provider I use, and they have 5.8.8.

So the two options I can see are a) install an up-to-date Perl on one of those accounts, or b) have these web applications run on my home machine (perhaps using http://www.easydns.com to provide consistent name resolution -- not sure is this is still available).

I could go find another web provider, but that's additional expense, and not really my best option right now. Feedback welcome!

[Corion]

I've done both, but in either case, compiling your own Perl is the right approach because in the long run, each application should get its own, independent Perl binary. At least unless you can maintain a comprehensive test suite and test environment to ensure that module and Perl upgrades go smoothly, decoupling applications from the Perl version seems to be the best approach to me.

Compiling your own Perl isn't hard, the nasty thing is installing the C libraries that some XS modules want. I don't know if/how BSD or Pair Networks provide such libraries like libxml2 or libexpat - if they don't provide them in a convenient way, you might want to go with the home-hosted version.

[talexb]

pair Networks does have a comprehensive list of modules installed, but if I install my own Perl, I worry that their module versions might conflict with the Perl that I've installed.

I'm also somewhat concerned that I'll blow up my disk quota by installing a newer Perl and then all of the newer modules -- but I'll give it a shot and see what happens.

[trippledubs]

Hi Alex

I suggest starting out with a virtual private server. Get in with a company that is having specials, you can find them all day long. You could do worse than starting out with lowendbox.com. You should be able to roll your own server (with root access) and some way to console in if you, say, misconfigure the firewall or otherwise break your network.

I wouldn't pay more than $8 a month. That would support maybe 3-10 simultaneous users. Then you can register a domain at godaddy if you want and point that to your public IP, voila, a new web site that will never be found by anyone except you and 8000 Chinese hackers a day. :)

The problem with running your own server. They're loud, they have power issues, they break, they take up space, they're ugly, and worse, they're connected to your home network. If you pay $100 for a pc, that is ~10 months of cloud time, and in 10 months your cloud server gets upgraded for you. Just my opinion! Have fun

[Your Mother]

I like this advice but godaddy is the Devil. I would suggest name.com as a good alternative; while mentioning, in case the similar name throws anyone, namecheap.com is a minor minion of Hell. There are many other decent ones and many other terrible ones. Read critical reviews before choosing a registrar. Some, like godaddy, get good reviews providing you never have any kind of problem or require any kind of customer service at all.

[talexb]

Well, that was entertaining. I did a wget on the latest Perl (5.22.0), did the Configure, then ran make, using nice so I didn't clobber my host:

-bash-4.3$ time nice make
make: Permission denied

real    0m0.002s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.001s
-bash-4.3$

So apparently make is locked down. :(

Aha! Digging around in /usr/local/bin, I see that pair also has versions 5.10.0, 5.10.,1, 5.14.1 and 5.16.2 installed. Let me see what I can do with that information.

[BrowserUk]

a) install an up-to-date Perl on one of those accounts,

Seems a no-brainer to me to have the perl I use under my complete control.

[1nickt]

Why can't you use perlbrew?

perlbrew is a program to automate the building and installation of
perl in an easy way. It provides multiple isolated perl environments,
and a mechanism for you to switch between them.

Everything are installed unter ~/perl5/perlbrew. You then need to
include a bashrc/cshrc provided by perlbrew to tweak the PATH for you.
You then can benefit from not having to run 'sudo' commands to install
cpan modules because those are installed inside your HOME too.

[talexb]

Thanks for your suggestion. I like perlbrew, and I may end up using that, but for now I've chosen a simpler method to get things going. I have set up local::lib on my account, then used the excellent cpanm to install the two modules that I need so far (Mojolicious::Lite and CAM::PDF).

The biggest hurdle I've had is to remember the chmod +x $your_script_here command. And I'm using sshfs so that I can edit locally, in the comfort of gvim, rather than fiddling with text mode vim which is doable but a bit ancient. (I love me some syntax highlighting.)

Thanks everyone for your feedback!

Update: Rob Hammond's blog post about running Mojo on a shared host was quite useful -- I feel a bit of a fraud when I put Apache on my resume when it actually means I need to run off to http://apache.org to go look something simple up. That's what happens when you only need to tweak something every year or two.

[Anonymous Monk]

Hi, I've started using wable.com (bundle #3) since a couple of weeks. I moved a web hosting I had with arvixe.com.
I read around and compared before choosing Wable.
I even found this promo message with them and it still works:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1439945
So for 8 USD you have 5 CPUs, 80 Gb SSD disk 6 Gb RAM.
I can tell it is quite fast (I'm in Italy and server is in NY) and ssh terminal connection via teraterm is totally stable.
Then you buy a DNS management service for 9.99 USD (I have it with arvixe.com) and you point to any on the 9 IPv4 addresses that they give you with your VPS.
Hope this helps.
Ciao

[Your Mother]

They look like they're worth a try. Promo is over though (when I just clicked through). It's back to 2GB RAM.

[Anonymous Monk]

It may have ended last week, but anyway they give it to you the extras if you click that link after you buy the bundle. I remember they explain these steps in another post somewhere that I saw while searching for a VPS.
Anyway they have a live chat if you go on their website and they can tell you before you buy.

[Anonymous Monk]

prices are per month :)

[Ravenhall]

Just go take a look at plenv or perlbrew . There is no need to beat yourself with a manual install when you can have a nice management environment. Unless you just enjoy that kind of thing, I guess.