Combust and the perl.org "preview problem"

Eric Wilhelm on 2009-09-07T01:33:52

I've been working on Combust::Spontaneously as a solution to the perl.org "preview problem".

The problem is that it's difficult to know what your changes to the perl.org site will look like unless you've got a combust running on your local machine (combust is the template rendering engine that runs perl.org.) So, while you can certainly checkout some site from https://svn.perl.org/perl.org/docs/live/ and make a tiny change, any non-trivial changes have had this barrier to entry where you need an apache (and some admin-fu) to see how combust would render it.

Through some subversive feats of hackenry, I've managed to wrap the combust evaluate_template() call with an HTTP::Server::Simple::Er frontend and everything else you need declared in the Build.PL's dependencies.

It's not quite cpan-and-go because combust still needs to be checked-out from git. But try it out (see 'Setup' in the combustier manpage) and see if you can't be hacking on the perl.org sites within a few minutes.

Update: this is now on the CPAN.

cpan Combust::Spontaneously perldoc combustier