$c->req->base broken after upgrade to Catalyst 5.90

Question

We have an old Catalyst app, originally developed for Catalyst 5.7, then updated to Catalyst 5.8 a couple years ago.

Now we're trying to upgrade to Catalyst 5.9, and now calls to $c->uri_for() are not giving reasonable results, but only when run from lighttpd, and not when run from the stand-alone debug server.

I have stripped out all the application controllers except Root.pm, and have turned it into a single sub:

package DCWeb::Controller::Root;

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.10.0;
use Moose;
use namespace::autoclean;

BEGIN { extends 'Catalyst::Controller' }

__PACKAGE__->config->{namespace} = '';

sub foo :Path {
    my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
    $c->log->debug("Base: ".$c->req->base);
}

1;

When I run the code from the stand-alone debug server, I get the following debug output (correct):

Jul  9 15:09:51 dc8 dc-web: Base: http://localhost:3000/

When I run the same code through lighttpd with FastCGI (incorrect):

Jul  9 15:10:25 dc8 dc-web: Base: http://localhost:8080/foo/

I am using Catalyst 5.90015-1 from Debian wheezy. I attempted to upgrade to the latest, but some of the dependencies required a newer version of perl. Furthermore, the Changelog doesn't seem to mention any (obviously) relevant uri_for fixes.

I am therefore assuming there is some sort of breakage between lighttpd and Catalyst. But where do I go from here?

Answer 1

The answer appears to be that Catalyst 5.9 no longer does some necessary fixing of lighttpd-passed environment variables. This can be re-enabled using the Plack::Middleware/LighttpdScriptNameFix module.

I accomplished this by adding:

use Catalyst qw/
.
.
            EnableMiddleware
    /;
use Plack::Middleware::LighttpdScriptNameFix;
.
.
__PACKAGE__->config(
    'Plugin::EnableMiddleware' => [
        'LighttpdScriptNameFix',
    ],
);

Allegedly, with lighttpd 1.4.23 or later this can also be done by enabling the fix-root-scriptname flag inside fastcgi.server in the lighttpd config, but this did not work for me.