jafax.org

Website framework for Jafax.org's website.

The app name, buyo, is named after a traditional style of Japanese dancing called Nihon Buyō, a form that is meant for entertainment. As the framework for this is based on Perl's excellent Dancer framework, and JAFAX is an event to entertain (and educate) about Japanese culture through Animé and other activities, it seems to fit as a theme.

Configuration

Buyo uses two different configurations:

1. Dancer2 configuration with environments using YAML, JSON, or Apache styled configuration files
   • config.yml
   • environments/deployment.yml
   • environments/production.yml
2. An INI file in conf.d to configure specific elements of the application code, such as backend authentication, which mechanism is in use for article content, and web URI:
   • conf.d/config.ini

Dancer2 Configuration

The Dancer2 configuration covers the plugins and how Dancer should run. A minimal Dancer2 configuration follows:

appname: "buyo"
port: 5000
host: localhost
behind_proxy: 1
logger: file
log: core
layout: "main"
charset: "UTF-8"
template: "template_toolkit"

# debugging
warnings: 0
show_errors: 0
startup_info: 0
traces: 0

engines:
  template:
    template_toolkit:
      start_tag: '[%'
      end_tag:   '%]'
      debug:     0

engines:
  logger:
    File:
      log_level: core

In a development environment, you'll likely want to enable warnings, show_errors, startup_info, and traces. However, in production, you'll want to keep those turned off, as there may be secrets that get logged.

Application configuration

The INI section needs the following to work:

[General]
debugging = 1

[Web]
webroot = localhost:5000/
article_mech = JSON

Apache Configuration

As can be seen from the configuration snippets above, Buyo is by default run on the localhost interface, and is proxied to the web. This protects against certain types of attacks, and allows for better scaling of the application by running it via Starman PSGI servlet environment under a third-party web server, such as LigHTTPd or Apache HTTPd's pre-fork workers. The configuration for Apache as used on our development server, is found in the apache2 subdirectory in the repo.