Re: [EXT] Web development

[Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de>]

Hi David!

On 9/4/20 5:56 PM, Thompson, David wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 11:44 AM Zelphir Kaltstahl
> <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de> wrote:
>> Hello Guile Users!
>>
>> Today I wanted to try developing a website in Guile again. I took a look
>> at GNU Artanis, but unfortunately it seems to be not compatible with
>> Guile 3 or at least not yet released for Guile 3. At least version 0.4.1
>> on Guix seems to still depend on Guile-2.2.x. So I thought "Hmmm I had
>> that example project once, but the issue was with serving static files
>> not being a good idea using Guile's web server." So that leads me to the
>> next point: What HTTP server to use?
>>
>> - I could use NGINX, but then again I don't really like NGINX
>> configurations, even though I am familiar with it.
>>
>> - I could try and get familiar with HAProxy. This seems to have the
>> advantage of being GPLv2.
>>
>> But how to create a development setup? I'd like to not install Docker on
>> this particular system (so far it is very clean, only using free
>> software), but still keep my system clean. Perhaps I could use Guix
>> somehow (Guix containers?). Both, NGINX and HAProxy, seem available on Guix.
>>
>> I seem to remember, that sending static files via Guile's web server
>> would be slow or insecure and that other HTTP servers make use of
>> sendfile or something, to be fast. Also they take care of MIME types
>> etc. I would be OK with being a bit slower, if I don't have to make a
>> huge effort to handle MIME types and whatever other stuff correctly. But
>> if there was something already implemented in Guile somewhere, which I
>> could copy for my project, perhaps that would work too.
>>
>> I would like to have a local development environment, where I can start
>> a server (and the Guile service behind it) with a command and shut it
>> down again, but keeping my system rather clean.
>>
>> So I have a few questions:
>>
>> (1) How do you do your Guile web development? What's the setup?
>>
>> (2) What do you use to serve static files (securely)? If you use Guile's
>> web server, how exactly do you do it? Do you have the code somewhere?
>>
>> (3) Perhaps there is a minimalistic option instead of NGINX or HAProxy
>> out there, which is also free software? Is there perhaps even anything
>> in Guile, which I could use, that is suitable for serving static files?
> I have never run a guile web application in a production environment
> but the same general pattern for web applications written in other
> languages would apply here:
>
> * nginx (or equivalent) sits in front and all requests go through it first
> * nginx handles all static file requests because it is very good at
> serving static files
> * all other requests are passed to the guile web application via reverse proxy
>
> Artanis is the only web framework I know of for Guile, but I've never
> used it. I wrote the initial version of the 'guix publish' tool using
> Guile's built-in web server and used the built-in pattern matcher for
> handling the very simple request routing it needed.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> - Dave

OK thanks for the pointer, I'll look at guix publish!

Best regards,
Zelphir