Hello, World! (and notes on MT under Plack)

So, I found myself installing Movable Type on my site to start posting once more. I set it up using the PSGI deployment notes from the GitHub docs, though there are a few things I missed that I should put down:

  • There's a lack of cpanfile listing down Plack, XMLRPC, and Starman dependencies, so install those manually according to the wiki doc. In addition, install some graphics library like Imager and set it in mt-config.cgi or MT will complain about a missing ImageDriver.
  • There are several config directives that need to be tweaked aside from PIDFilePath that need to be added:
    • CGIPath should point to the URL going to the MT installation, normally this can be some path in $url/cgi-bin/mt but one can just shorten it to $url/mt
    • StaticPath must not be your website's document root, but rather the path where MT's static files will be (e.g. /var/www/html/mt-static if the website root is in /var/www/html)
    • StaticFilePath should be set to correspond to the URL in StaticPath
  • Take care to set the first website root to a directory other than the MT directory; something like /path/to/mt/html would be ok.
  • Finally, deploy Starman with something like daemontools just like any proper PSGI application (I should put this under a separate note later :)