Re^2: Stopping Module Croaking

[gellyfish]

People keep saying this, but overlook that CGI::Carp has a convenient mechanism to control what gets sent to the browser with fatalsToBrowser activated:

#!/usr/bin/perl
                                                                      
+          
use strict;
                                                                      
+          
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser set_message);
                                                                      
+          
                                                                      
+          
my $sub_message = sub {
                        my ($message) = @_;
                        if ($ENV{REMOTE_ADDR} eq '127.0.0.1')
                        {
                           print "Oops: $message";
                        }
                        else
                        {
                           print "Unable to process, please try later"
+;
                        }
                     };
                                                                      
+          
set_message($sub_message);
                                                                      
+          
die "aiee!";

Of course you can use whatever condition you like to control whether the text of the die message gets displayed or not - a debugging flag or similar might make more sense in some circumstances.

fatalsToBrowser provides a simple mechanism for trapping exceptions in the code which might otherwise result in at best a confusing 500 status in the users browser, and the advantage of doing something like the above is that you can use the same code for debugging as you do in production thus reducing the possibility of introducing new bugs when removing diagnostic code.

You should bear in mind that not everyone has the luxury of access to the error logs when deploying a web application to production, indeed some servers (such as IIS) make it very difficult to get that information.

/J\