Nitrous.IO: Dancing on the clouds

In a previous post about Preparing the dance floor I explain how to setup Dancer in several OS such as CygWin on Windows, Linux (Ubuntu and CentOS) and Mac OS X (OS X Mavericks) but recently I found that is possible to install and use Dancer on Nitrous.io.

Why Nitrous.io?

Why not? Nitrous.io is a cloud development environment this means you can code for free using a Web Browser in your computer or tablet; or even using a SSH client from anywhere. You also have access to a Web IDE and collaborative coding.

Nitrous.io allows to code in several programming language such as Ruby on Rails, Python with Django, Node.js and Go but it does not explain how to code with Perl on Dancer.

Installing Dancer on Nitrous.io.

The installation process is similar to what was explained in the post Preparing the dance floor but there is a few minor changes.

Cpanminus cannot be installed in a share directory you so cannot use the sudo option and the installation will be done in ~/perl5. After it is installed, the directory ~/perl5/bin need to be included in the PATH variable.

	curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus
	echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/perl5/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
	. ~/.bashrc
	cpanm App::cpanoutdated
	cpanm App::cpanlistchanges

view raw install_cpanm_on_nitrous.io.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now you are ready to update the Perl modules but this will increase the used storage. If you have some nitro (N2O) available it is recommended to get more storage.

	# (Optional) Print a list of the outdated modules:
	cpan-outdated -p
	# (Optional) See the changes for the outdated modules:
	cpan-listchanges `cpan-outdated -p`
	# Update the outdated modules:
	cpan-outdated -p | cpanm

view raw Update_Perl_modules.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now you are ready to install dancer.

cpanm Dancer

view raw Install_Dancer.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Create the application

To create the application and start it just do the same you do in other environment.

cd workspace
dancer -a myapplication
cd myapplication
mv bin/app.pl bin/server.pl
./bin/server.pl

To view the application, in the upper left side, select Preview > Port 3000. In the new browser tab there is your new application.

To have the application on Github follow the instructions from Nitrous.io help in http://help.nitrous.io/github-add-key/.

Nitrous.io is just another good option to develop your dancer application. There are pros and cons about this, but this is a great opportunity to dance in the clouds.