vhein79 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi!

I run a website, changing now from FCGI to PSGI using Plack as server. The behaviour should be the same as with the old Apache website, (which I configured with .htaccess files for each directory) so I want to use js when it is needed, and show it as text/plain when someone clicks such a non binary file in my download directory.

I don't want to use dancer etc now, because I had to make big changes to the website then (FCGI and PSGI are quite similar to use). I tested a bit and the behaviour seems to be version dependent (on Windows it works, on CentOS not), but I want a safe way using different Plack::MIME instances for different directories.

What I have now uses the same Plack::MIME instance and doesn't work correctly when I include .html, .css etc there: 

use Plack::Builder;
use Plack::MIME;

# normal behaviour  /html/
# special behaviour /html/downloads/

for my $expr (
         ".c", ".cpp",".csv", ".dat", ".dpl"
       , ".gp", ".h", ".hpp", ".ini"
       , ".java", "makefile", ".m", ".mac"
       , ".pl", ".pm", ".pod", ".py"
       , "README", ".sch", ".sh", ".txt") {
  Plack::MIME->add_type($expr => 'text/plain');
} 
 
builder {
  enable 'Plack::Middleware::Static',
    path => qr{/html/}, root => '.';

  # normal behaviour:
  # needs a new content_type instance! how doing this?
  # enable 'Plack::Middleware::Static',
  #   path => qr{^/html/(?!downloads).*\.
  #              (css|gif|jpg|js|pdf|png)$}, root => '.'; 
      
  mount "/" => $app1;
  mount "/imggenerator.pl" => $app2;
};

[download]
I could treat every single file in my $app1, but I think configuring that with Plack should be possible.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How to use Plack::Middleware::Static
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 03, 2021 at 10:36 UTC
[reply]

      Thank you for the really fast answer!

      This works: 

      use Plack::Builder;
use Plack::MIME;

for my $expr (
       ".c", ".cpp", ".css", ".csv", ".dat", ".dpl"
     , ".gp", ".h", ".hpp", ".html", ".ini"
     , ".java", ".js", "makefile", "Makefile", ".m", ".mac"
     , ".pl", ".pm", ".pod", ".py", "README", ".sch", ".sh", ".txt") {
  Plack::MIME->add_type($expr => 'text/plain');
} 
 
builder {
  enable 'Plack::Middleware::Static',
    path => qr{^/html/downloads/},
    root => '.'; 
      
  enable 'Plack::Middleware::Static',
    path => qr{^/html/(?!downloads).*\.(css|gif|jpg|js|pdf|png)$},
    root => '.',
    content_type => sub { Plack::MIME->mime_type($_[0]); }; 
    
  mount "/" => $app1;
  mount "/imggenerator.pl" => $app2;
};

      [download]
      But I'm far from really understanding it and there still is one issue: .html in downloads are still treated as html files, not as plain text.

[reply]
[d/l]
        Per default, Plack::Middleware::Static will serve your files depending on their extension by using Plack::MIME. So I suggest that you just drop your own invocation of Plack::MIME for the "normal" behaviour and override it for your download directory like this: content_type => sub { 'text/plain' }

        Edited to add: After a glance at the code, you can also provide the content type directly:

        content_type => 'text/plain'
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        Have you confirmed that the server is actually sending Content-Type: text/plain? I know at least some browsers once would interpret text/plain as text/html if the contents "look like" HTML and I do not know if modern browsers still do that.

[reply]

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