Installing Dancer

Install Dancer via CPAN:

$ sudo cpan Dancer

Creating an application

Since version 0.9904, a helper is shipped with the distribution which lets you create an application with a single command:

$ dancer -a mywebapp
+ mywebapp/app.psgi
+ mywebapp/config.yml
+ mywebapp/environments
+ mywebapp/environments/development.yml
+ mywebapp/environments/production.yml
+ mywebapp/views
+ mywebapp/views/index.tt
+ mywebapp/views/layouts
+ mywebapp/views/layouts/main.tt
+ mywebapp/mywebapp.pl
+ mywebapp/lib
+ mywebapp/lib/mywebapp.pm
+ mywebapp/lib/mywebapp
+ mywebapp/public
+ mywebapp/public/css
+ mywebapp/public/css/style.css
+ mywebapp/public/css/error.css
+ mywebapp/public/images
+ mywebapp/public/404.html
+ mywebapp/public/dispatch.fcgi
+ mywebapp/public/dispatch.cgi
+ mywebapp/public/500.html
+ mywebapp/t
+ mywebapp/t/002_index_route.t
+ mywebapp/t/001_base.t
+ mywebapp/Makefile.PL

Everything is ready and works out of the box. It's already a working "Hello World" application waiting to be hacked into whatever you like.

Hacking into the routes

# myapp.pm
use Dancer;

get '/' => sub {
    'Hello world!'
};

# add other routes here and there...

dance;

Running the dance

$ cd mywebapp
$ ./mywebapp.pl
>> Listening on 127.0.0.1:3000
== Entering the dance floor ...

The above shows Dancer acting as a mini web server, but of course Dancer webapps can also run from nearly any web server using Plack/PSGI.