G'day 1nickt,

I've had some minimal exposure to Dancer but don't recall ever seeing .dancer associated with that.

I've just started a new $work project that uses Dancer2. That required a fair bit of reading and this is where .dancer kept appearing.

I'm also not using the supplied script; but I have been looking at its documented output as a reference source. Some files I'll need with some modifications; some I won't want at all; and then there was .dancer with a huge question mark hanging over it.

The only thing I can speculate is that it's a marker for the base directory -- but that would be odd since there's a method for that. On the other hand, I do usually always have such a dot-file marking the root of my app installation on the FS, so that scripts know where to look for library paths, and so on. Most of my scripts start with something like:

BEGIN {
    use Path::Tiny;
    my $base = path(__FILE__)->parent;
    $base = $base->parent until -f "$base/.some-dot-file" or $base->is
+_rootdir;
    unshift @INC, "$base/lib";
}
[download]

... so that they don't have to know where they live. Possibly .dancer has or once had a purpose like that?


The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

That's interesting speculation; however, all the code that I've seen, in various parts of the documentation, has:

use FindBin;
use lib "$FindBin::Bin/../lib";
[download]

Yes, it could be legacy code: https://github.com/PerlDancer/Dancer2/tree/master/share/skel indicates .dancer was added five years ago.

If I come across any other information, I'll post it. Thanks for your attempts to help with this.

— Ken