Today at the ACT hackathon at the French Perl Workshop we (mostly haj and me) used act-starter-debian to set up a test instance of the ACT PSGI branch on a new server. The server is now hosted at a small Hetzner node belonging to me, and I also set up the hostname on my infrastructure (because I can easily access it):

https://act-test.plix.at/demo

All things including user registration should work, though I still have problems sending mails to google (because they are very picky with the mail setup, and I suck at setting up mail systems; I will take a look at it together with someone who knows mail-setup better than I when I'm back in Vienna).

If you have a bit free time, please test the site: Create accounts, register, submit talks, etc. If you want, we can give you some of the special rights, so we can test the various admin interfaces etc. We should also add some more templates (eg for the menu, and for translations).

Please report issues, bugs, etc here: https://github.com/domm/ACT-PSGI-demo/issues. But please do not add issues for general ACT features/bugs; only for things that work in the current/legacy ACT, but don't work in the PSGI fork!

The main point of this endeavour is to check if the PSGI branch works good enough to replace the old mod_perl1 instance (which is not running too stable). The PSGI branch also has quite a few bugs fixed (eg Unicode in the Wiki), so I think it would be good to switch over to using it as soon as possible.

While act-starter-debian makes it very easy to install ACT on a dedicated machine (real or virtual), it's not perfect for installing it alongside other projects in your home dir. So I do think that coming up with a Dockerfile to at least run the webserver would be helpful to make contributing easier. A complete docker setup for the whole app (including Postgres, nginx, mailing, etc) would be even more awesome (though then we have to also think about orchestration, and things get pretty complex pretty fast..)

elbeho also merged a few bugfixes provided by haj into the legacy repo.

Thanks to haj for preparing a stable PSGI branch from the various other branches, and for documenting and automating the installation process.