Perl on Bluemix

Quick Start

1. Marcus DelGreco at #FluentConf said something about perl support on platforms. I mentioned Bluemix allowed bring your own buildpack

2. Looking through the buildpack lists didn't turn up Perl per se but…

3. … enter sourcey-buildpack. It's a generic buildpack! From its README I knew I was in the right spot:

   Isn't it simply amazing to see these demos, where they throw a bunch of php, ruby, Java or python code at a Cloud Foundry site and it gets magically turned into a running web applications. Alas for me, life is often a wee bit more complicated than that. My projects always seem to required a few extra libraries or they are even written in an dead scripting language like Perl.

4. And now for that tl;dr-inspiring moment:

Let's see if the canned sample works. Hint: yes.

First, cf login into Bluemix, and then:

$ git clone https://github.com/oetiker/sourcey-buildpack
$ cd sourcey-buildpack/example
$ cf push MYAPPLICATION$$ -m 128M -b https://github.com/oetiker/sourcey-buildpack

The above builds perl (takes a while the first time) and deploys a little app that just dumps the deserialized JSON out.

Improving

But wait! It could be even simpler. So, I opened PR oetiker/sourcey-buildpack#2 which adds a manifest file to the example. Then, only cf push is needed, the -b … option is now unnecessary.