Blank - a skeleton Mojolicious website with some essential features

[Wail75]

Hello,

I have just published a personal project called Blank. It is a skeleton Mojolicious website with some essential features. https://github.com/Wail75/Blank

My motivation is that, over the years, I have a done a few Mojolicious (and RoR) personal projects and they were always single user websites because I was too lazy to do all the boring work of setting up an account system etc vs just making the features I wanted.

So this time around, as I plan on developing a few websites, I started by doing a sort of extended tutorial, inspired by the Mojolicious tutorials and some others, with essential features like an account system (register, login, logout, private pages etc), email sending (for confirming email address or password recovery), internationalization etc

I have already developed a small website based on Blank, a quiz engine called Prof (I use it for learning and as an open source example for using Blank): https://github.com/Wail75/Prof-Website
There is also another repository with Podman files to start a Blank website (useless in itself of course, it is a starting point for a real website) : https://github.com/Wail75/Podman-Blank

I welcome all improvements, advice or criticisms. I have searched for a similar project online but I couldn't really find an equivalent (often very old projects or larger in scope). I have more than a dozen years of professional experience as a backend developer but mostly adding features on existing websites, I never really got to start a new website from scratch.

One point I want to insist on, based on my experience, is to facilitate testing on the whole website, with a test environment that can be recreated from zero. I have often worked on commercial websites where it was not possible to recreate a test environment because of too many configurations and prerequisites that were forgotten, so the testing was done on a copy of the production environment or on a parallel staging environment that was manually updated over time.

No AI/LLM has been used. Artistic license following the Mojolicious project.

EDIT: changed the links to the repos

[guest20]

@Wail75 In its current state your example might be a bit less useful than you're hoping - gittea pops a login prompt if one clicks on any of the files, so visitors who are not logged in can only see the readme and none of the other goodies

[Wail75]

Sorry about that, I checked if a non-logged in user could see the project but not a file... I'm looking for a solution but no luck yet. I might move the code to another platform...

[Wail75]

Ok, I have moved the repos to Github (following Mojolicious) and I've check that files (other than README) can be read by a non logged in user. I also edited my first post with the new links.

[guest20]

The optometrist says "and can you read the bottom line". The patent replies "copyright acme eye charts, 1949"

I see the code now. It's a shame slop bots traffic forces peoples' forges to be so paranoid about actually serving code.

Also, your schema could use an audit log for changes to user and options to record warnings/bans in case that user decides to be a jerk. "It's a surprise tool that will help us later"

[Wail75]

Thank you for the idea! I won't be able to add it very soon but that's a must have and I don't have it on my TODO list yet.

[Wail75]

I should also have added a "delete my account" button (archiving it then possibly some backoffice validation) both for privacy and even testing purposes.

[brianread108]

Can you post a full link that we can click on? I've been unable to find it so far.

TIA.

[Wail75]

Other than https://github.com/Wail75/Blank ? I don't see what other link I could post.

[ajmetz]

The entire time I've been using Mojolicious, I have been starved of seeing other people's mojolicious site code.
[ Most I've seen is the examples folder that comes with Mojo::Pg ]

So far I've checked out a bit of the Prof site - I saw you were setting up your validator checks which seemed cool, as that was something I recently learned, =).

So I am now going to look at your blank, and see how you've done stuff there, =). Thank you so much!

Years ago, Nigel Hamilton said he had 80% of what you need in a mojolicious webapp, and we spoke about a Perl accelerator programme to support Perl coding startups (this was an idea of Rick Deller's and he got us both to work on it years ago), and that was the first time I heard the word Ansible - he was like - "yeah, I could get everything setup so it gives you 80% of what you need out of the box, and then you just code the other 20%...but it's my private code, atm, and I'd have to tidy it up before releasing it publicly...." - and I never heard of, or got to see any tidied up public version. Maybe it's out there somewhere, or only an email away, I don't know. But I would love to see more Mojolicious users show how they do things, so I can compare how I'm doing things, and learn or get ideas and improve. Of course, it is Perl, so there's always more than one way to do it. Even in a framework like Mojolicious.

I've been trying to come up with my own "blank" too, =). I also seem to be doing it an unusual way. I haven't created a "blank" of my own - I've merely worked on two projects with the same base, with the work-in-progress management app being the latest one ( https://github.com/ajmetz/management/tree/develop/ ) and the Short Notice London Perl and Raku Workshop 2025 Event Hype Site being a finished, but quite rushed one ( https://github.com/ajmetz/LPW-Hype ) . I'm trying to combine Mojolicious, with Object::Pad, with Locale::Maketext, and now (in the "management" webapp) with Log::Any too. But it all could be you ain't gonna need that (I have hacked internationalisation into debug and trace logs which is likely unnecessary).

What I like about your project, is you look to be further ahead than me. I'm presently unemployed with high costs, and have a very unstable life as a result, and am problem solving general survival and financial reconciliation rather than getting to do fun code like this. That's my excuse anyway. ;-). So kudos - and many thanks for sharing, =D.

[Wail75]

Thank you for the kind words. I am also in between jobs and doing this project on my own dime (although I will use it as a foundation for a commercial website).
I will gladly look at your two projects. I took inspiration from different sources, Mojo tutorial of course, also this 10 years old tutorial and others. I found this list of Mojolicious projects but it has a lot of dead links.

My main goal was really just to break free from the "single user" sites that I have been doing before. This code is not "battle tested" and I have rushed to publish Prof-Website so that I have something people can try (although there are tons of Quiz websites) and break.
I have a very long TODO list including some things that should have shipped with the first version...

The form validation part was some work... I realize how important it is to automate as much as possible this (as it is both boring and extremely important to the user) and I regret not having started with this. The basic model of just stressing out the original field label is quite efficient (compared to giving detailed input errors).

[christopherraa]

The general question of "what does other people do?" is generally not answered here in the Perl-world (I think). At least that has been a recurring thought of mine. This might be due to most people writing Perl for $work, and most of that stuff is never shared. We have a pretty large (considering our team size) codebase here and I have been thinking about giving a talk on how we do stuff here, both from a technical perspective but also when it comes to managing deliverables, product life cycle and so on. Might be some key learnings that could benefit others. If I ever get around to going to a conference again I can propose a talk on this in case it is interesting to someone.

[ajmetz]

The general question of "what does other people do?" is generally not answered here in the Perl-world (I think). At least that has been a recurring thought of mine. This might be due to most people writing Perl for $work, and most of that stuff is never shared. We have a pretty large (considering our team size) codebase here and I have been thinking about giving a talk on how we do stuff here, both from a technical perspective but also when it comes to managing deliverables, product life cycle and so on. Might be some key learnings that could benefit others. If I ever get around to going to a conference again I can propose a talk on this in case it is interesting to someone.

Well, am organising the London Perl and Raku Workshop 2026 with JJ Atria of https://github.com/jjatria/perl-opentelemetry fame for November this year, and Julien is contributing too, and I'm sure we'd welcome such a talk - you can propose it to organisers AT londonperlworkshop DOT com =). Julien is also organising next year's German Perl Workshop - https://act.yapc.eu/gpw2027/

[daleif]

For my webapps (as they all end having the same support stuff and structure), i've ended up writing my own Mojolicious::Command::Author::generate::xxx module, such that mojo generate xxx MyApp sets everything up the way I like it.

Clearly not super configurable and not for everyone, but works for me.

It's interesting to read the comments here. I agree, it would have been nice to have some sort of here's a useful helper I made, maybe it is useful for others... sharing type of thing. Or, othph, just got hit by this gotchya, here's what not to do...

[guest20]

The "helper sharing thing" you're thinking of is called "CPAN" /lh

perldoc perlnewmod