For an upcoming project, I decided to try and use Mojolicious in production. That would be the first time, so I'm quite excited to see what's going to happen.

A few days ago I wrote some sample application that just loads a basic Template Toolkit template and renders it, and benchmarked it using both:

• mod_perl and Plack::Handler::Apache2 and,
• using starman as self-contained HTTP server running the psgi application

I have to say that I was quite impressed with the performance level of Starman. I got 1,000+ (a thousand plus) requests per second without the server even breaking a sweat. The command line, just in case, was:

starman --workers 32 ./app.psgi

Anyway, back to using TT. I found myself searching for recipes on how to use TT with Mojolicious because there wasn't a clear documented answer on how to do it, or at least I didn't find it. An example of what I came up with follows.

Step 1: the Mojolicious application class

First you have to create your application class. You should probably use the script that generate the basic skeleton for you. There's nice documentation on how to do that. My class looks like this:

package My::PSGI::App;

use strict;
use base 'Mojolicious';
use Opera::Config;

sub startup {
    my $self = shift;
    
    $self->secret('some-secret-random-string');

    # Our internal configuration system
    my $conf = Opera::Config->new();
    my $tmpl_dir = $conf->get('Template:include_dir');
    my $cache_dir = $conf->get('Template:cache_dir');

    # Tell Mojolicious we want to load the TT renderer plugin
    $self->plugin(tt_renderer => {
        template_options => {
            # These options are specific to TT
            INCLUDE_PATH => $tmpl_dir,
            COMPILE_DIR => $cache_dir,
            COMPILE_EXT => '.ttc',
            # ... anything else to be passed on to TT should go here
        },
    });

    $self->renderer->default_handler('tt');

    my $r = $self->routes;

    # Your routes should go here
    $r->route('/login')->to('account#login');
    # ... and so on ...

}

1;

To have your TT templates picked up, you only need a few more things.

Mojolicious::Plugin::TtRenderer

When you declare that you want to load the tt_renderer plugin (see above, $self->plugin(tt_renderer=>...)), then Mojolicious will "camelize" the tt_renderer string, turn it into Mojolicious::Plugin::TtRenderer, and try to load that plugin, if available.

Turns out there was a MojoX::Renderer::TT CPAN module that also contained a class called Mojolicious::Plugin::TtRenderer. I said there was because Sebastian Riedel, the main developer of Mojolicious had in the meantime deprecated the MojoX namespace.

Since we're building the modules we want to use in production as deb packages, we would have run the risk to package MojoX::Renderer::TT to have it changed later because of this namespace conflict. To avoid this, I decided to fork its repository and put together a patch to remove the use of the MojoX:: namespace. With this, I hoped to get the thing done and hopefully picked up quickly by the maintainer of MojoX::Renderer::TT.

Turned out that he was super responsive (thanks Ask!) to merge the change and release it to CPAN, so ladies and gentlemen, I hereby announce we have Mojolicious::Plugin::TtRenderer 1.20+ out!

In fact, the old deprecated MojoX:: module is still there, just don't use it, and install Mojolicious::Plugin::TtRenderer instead.

Templates naming

Another thing you need for TT to work out of the box is that your templates should(*) be named sometemplate.html.tt. (*) probably you can deviate from this convention, I just don't know yet.

Your controller should specify TT as the renderer

UPDATE: this is not needed. If you're using:

$self->renderer->default_handler('tt');

in your main application class, then you won't need to specify format and handler in every controller.

Again, not sure it's really needed (no, it's not, read above), check before you copy/paste. Here's a simple action from one of my controllers (following the previous example):

package My::PSGI::App::Account;
 
use strict;
use base 'Mojolicious::Controller';
 
sub login {
    my $self = shift;
    
    $self->render(
        template => 'path/to/template', # *without* .html.tt
        format   => 'html',
        handler  => 'tt',
    );
    
}

1;

That should be it: have fun!

EDIT: Thanks Robert for the suggestions.