Catalyst Development Server - not showing routes and errors

Question

To set the seem, I'm an experienced developer and have coded many languages over the years, including a good bit of Perl back in late 90's early 00's. Since then I haven't touched Perl, but now have a client who wants some changes making to an existing open source project built using Perl5 and Catalyst. I've quickly worked through the Catalyst tutorials, read a few books online and am now starting to feel my way.

I have the existing project up and running on a clean Debian Wheezy VM and am testing the code an my changes using the Catalyst Development Server.

While working through the tutorials and writing a few test apps, the development server would always output a lot of useful information when run, such as the configured routes etc.. But under this project, when I run the server I don't get a lot of output. I don't even get messages sent to $c->log->debug();

I run the server with the following command:

perl ./script/asnn_panel_server.pl -d -r

Which outputs the following:

HTTP::Server::PSGI: Accepting connections at http://0:3000/

I can access the server and the application is running fine.

In a test controller action I can try the following lines:

$c->log->debug("A test debug message");
print "A test print message\n";

The debug log message does not appear in my development server output, but the print line does. So I know the call to $c->log->debug() is not blowing up, because the next line is executing, but where is it going?

So essentially I feel I 'could' get more useful output from the Catalyst Development server, but am not.

I have googles but can't find anything of relevance. Sorry if I'm going in the wrong direction here, I do know what I doing in general, but have a lot to pick up here in a short amount of time!

I suspect my issues might be specific to the open source project I'm working on, but there's not a lot of help to be had from that direction. Could anyone give me any pointers as to what to investigate?

UPDATE : I now realise that the application is using log4perl, which is configured to send $c->log->debug() to syslog. I still don't know why the Catalyst Development server isn't providing much output.

:wq

John Napiorkowski John Napiorkowski · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-23T23:06:12

For anyone coming upon this later, if you want to see the developer debug stream (stuff about the routes and classes and models your application is using, etc you need to be in debug mode, which you can do easily by setting CATALYST_DEBUG=1 in your env (I often start my app like "CATALYST_DEBUG=1 perl -Ilib script/myapp_server.pl"

There is sadly a difference between debug as a log level and debugging mode. The way catalyst works is that if you are in debugging mode (via CATALYST_DEBUG=1, or any of the other documented ways this gets turned on) all this debugging stream gets sent to the log, most of it logged at the debug level (again debug as a log level is distinct from debugging developer mode :( ) So you need both debugging mode and your logger should be set to listen at the debug level.

If you use the default catalyst log, it is debug level by default, so doing CATALYST_DEBUG=1 is all you need. If you use a different logger be sure to enable debug log level for your development setup, if you wish to see those developer stream logs.

Catalyst Development Server - not showing routes and errors

2 Answers