Plack Handbook - Run a static web server with plack

Day 5: Run a static web server with Plack

The Plack distribution comes with some ready made PSGI applications in the Plack::App namespace. Some of them are pretty handy, for instance Plack::App::File and Plack::App::Directory.

Plack::App::File translates a request path like /foo/bar.html into a local file like /path/to/htdocs/foo/bar.html, opens the file handle, and passes it back as a PSGI response. It basically does what a static web server like lighttpd, nginx or Apache does.

Plack::App::Directory is a wrapper around Plack::App::File that gives a directory index, just like Apache's mod_autoindex does.

Using these applications is easy. Just write a .psgi file like this:

 use Plack::App::File;
 my $app = Plack::App::File->new(root => "$ENV{HOME}/public_html");

and run it with plackup:

 > plackup file.psgi

Now you can access any file under your ~/public_html with the URL http://localhost:5000/somefile.html

You can also use Plack::App::Directory. This time let's run it with just the plackup command without a .psgi file:

 > plackup -MPlack::App::Directory \
  -e 'Plack::App::Directory->new(root => "$ENV{HOME}/Sites");
 HTTP::Server::PSGI: Accepting connections at http://0:5000/

The plackup command, like the perl command, accepts flags like -I (include path), -M (modules to load), and -e (the code to eval), so it's easy to load these Plack::App::* applications without ever touching a .psgi file!

There are a couple of other Plack::App applications in the Plack distribution.