Sorry to hear about your difficulties with the installation. I haven’t used Catalyst in a while, but I definitely agree that the installation takes much longer and more effort than necessary. Part of the problem is the sheer number of dependencies; each of them is constantly being updated and inevitably some component will fail tests on some platforms (relevant or not the failure may be). I remember having to force install several packages too. Packaging & ease of installation is definitely something that Catalyst developers should improve.

I’ve found other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django to be generally a bit better in this regard, but they haven’t been trouble-free, either. Particularly, mixing operating system packages and manually installed packages inevitably produces an updating mess.

Anyway, good to hear that you’ve gotten it working successfully now. Thanks for your comments!

But it was almost an all-day effort watching CPAN gasp and churn, and the test failures make one wonder whether the thing will be stable.

I’ve never encountered a framework that takes so long to install so unsuccessfully. I really want to give it a try, too. But I’m close to giving up. There are just too many bizarre dependencies and the CPAN installation process, while trying to seem all wise and knowing and fault tolerant, does not really make it clear why things are failing.

I did get Catalyst to install in some simple configuration on my Linux machine but again… it was like watching the Matrix for three hours before I had a working installation of catalyst.pl even on those systems.

If Perl and frameworks like Catalyst are to compete with other script languages and Web 2.0 frameworks, they really need to be simple, quick and easy to install. Perl is OK in this regard; but Catalyst just seems impossible to get working on Windows anyway. This is nuts.

First of all, thanks so much. I’ve been trawling forums and decimating my server for the last two days trying to get this working. Even though Virtualmin claim to provide one-click fcgid enable-ment for the GPL suite now, it didn’t work for me (kept redirecting me to the cgi-bin folder instead of executing the files in public_html).

So yeah, I got a Joomla sandbox site working by enabling the one-click cgi-wrapper, then modifying the apache ${DOM}.conf file to use your settings.

However (there’s always a however, isn’t there?), when I tried creating a server template with exactly what you wrote above (i.e. not using the one-click cgi thing then modifying), it didn’t quite work. When I transfer the Joomla core files into public_html and attempt to load up the browser step-by-step installer, it gives me a 503 error (unlike before when the installer worked perfectly).

The error I got in the apache error.log is: [warn] mod_fcgid: can’t apply process slot for /home/domains/joomla/public_html/index.php

[EDIT:] Okay, I found the solution. Turns out the problem was with the write permissions of the /var/lib/apache2/fcgid/sock directory. I chmod’d it to 755 and the problem was fixed.

Also, I had to chmod a+x ${HOME}/fcgi-bin/php5.fcgi to get it working. Is that normal or a security problem?

Again, thanks so much for ending my 48 hours of serverlicious torment!

Francis

a. I didn’t include anything between <> tags.. that’s just the partial bit of the config file that’s visible from that section of Virtualmin. If you edit the config file manually, of course, you’ll have to find the right place to put it.

b and c. Yes — in fact, another prerequisite is to have installed the Virtualmin packages for Apache, or have a custom build that changes the docroot (Search the manual for “docroot”). The default version of suEXEC only executes things under /var/www for security purposes. Do you see anything in the suexec log file?

Just wanted to let you know that: a) I think your wordpress ate a part of the apache config you have there (everything between greater-than and lesser-than tags) b) maybe you’d like to point out the (obvious) prerequisites of having to install libapache2-mod-fcgid and php5-cgi c) this isn’t working for me – i only get 404 everywhere i go. and my /var/log/apache2/error_log says: “script ‘/var/www/php.php’ not found or unable to stat”, but i have NO idea where the ‘/var/www’ is coming from.