Jifty at MIT

The jifty locker contains a complete installation of Jifty for developing and deploying Jifty applications on Athena, Debathena and scripts.mit.edu

Getting Started

To get started with Jifty on your favorite Athena Linux or Debathena machine, run

add jifty

At the athena% prompt. You should then have a jifty command, and you can create and develop a Jifty application. For more help getting started you can follow, e.g. the jifty.org Getting Started directions.

The jifty locker also contains a number of useful perl libraries, including Devel::REPL; Run re.pl from the locker to get a perl REPL (read-eval-print loop).

Deploying Applications

Jifty Applications are easy to deploy on scripts.mit.edu using FastCGI. Set up an application in your web_scripts folder, and then run the jifty-scripts program in the top level of your Jifty application. It will ask you a few questions, and then set up things for deployment on scripts and sql.mit.edu. jifty-scripts creates or modifies four files:

• bin/jifty-fastcgi and bin/.htaccess -- These are required for scripts to run Jifty as a FastCGI Application. You should not have to edit these files.

• etc/site_config.yml -- jifty-scripts configures your application to use a MySQL database against sql.mit.edu, using the credentials from your my.cnf file. It also sets up the BaseURL based on the information you give.

• .htaccess -- This contains Apache mod_rewrite directives to rewrite URLs into requests to the Jifty fastcgi handler. You may need to move and/or edit this file depending on where your application is set up. See the Sample Configurations for more information.

Getting help

• For help specifically using Jifty on Athena, send mail jifty@mit.edu
• For generic help with Jifty, you can contact the Jifty developers
• For help specific to scripts.mit.edu, contact the Scripts team at scripts@mit.edu

Using jifty's perl modules elsewhere

The jifty locker also contains a large number of useful perl modules you are welcome to use in your own perl scripts or applications on Athena. Simply either.

• Add /mit/jifty/perl to your $PERL5LIB environment variable, or
• Include use lib '/mit/jifty/perl' at the top of your perl scripts.

The programs in and installed by the jifty locker already do one or both so that you should not normally have to worry about this if you are only developing a typical Jifty application.