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2010年07月16日

Modern Perl administration tools

I'm probably preaching to the choir (the phrase we use in German is more like "bringing owls to Athens") and I'm certainly not saying anything new here, but I would like to talk about two modern tools that make working with Perl versions and CPAN distributions very easy: perlbrew and cpanm.

perlbrew

perlbrew (see App::perlbrew) automates building and installing various perl versions in the user's home directory.

curl -LO http://xrl.us/perlbrew
chmod +x perlbrew
./perlbrew install

With this, perlbrew installs itself to ~/perl5/perlbrew. Now you can do (and I'm quoting from the App::perlbrew documentation):

# Initialize
perlbrew init

# Install some Perls
perlbrew install perl-5.12.1
perlbrew install perl-5.8.1
perlbrew install perl-5.11.5

# See what were installed
perlbrew installed

# Switch perl in the $PATH
perlbrew switch perl-5.12.1
perl -v

# Switch to another version
perlbrew switch perl-5.8.1
perl -v

# Switch to a certain perl executable not managed by perlbrew.
perlbrew switch /usr/bin/perl

# Or turn it off completely. Useful when you messed up too deep.
perlbrew off

# Use 'switch' command to turn it back on.
perlbrew switch perl-5.12.1

cpanm

cpanm is a script to get, unpack, build and install modules from CPAN. It does so in pretty much the simplest way possible, without dependencies or configuration.

To install it onto a freshly brewed perl, use this command:

curl -L http://cpanmin.us/ | perl - App::cpanminus

Then you can do (and again, I'm quoting from the App::cpanminus documentation):

cpanm Test::More                                 # install Test::More
cpanm MIYAGAWA/Plack-0.99_05.tar.gz              # full distribution path
cpanm http://example.org/LDS/CGI.pm-3.20.tar.gz  # install from URL
cpanm ~/dists/MyCompany-Enterprise-1.00.tar.gz   # install from a local file
cpanm --interactive Task::Kensho                 # Configure interactively
cpanm .                                          # install from local directory
cpanm --installdeps .                            # install all deps for the current dir
cpanm -L extlib Plack                            # install Plack and its deps to extlib
cpanm --mirror http://cpan.cpantesters.org/ DBI  # use the fast-syncing mirror

The cpanm --installdeps . command will work if you have a Makefile.PL or a Build.PL in the current directory, but if you use Dist::Zilla you're likely to use a plugin that generates the Makefile.PL and the dependencies for you. In that case you can use this:

dzil listdeps | cpanm --skip-installed

Another tool that works well with cpanm is cpan-outdated (see App::cpanoutdated). It will simply list all the outdated modules' distribution names in a format that can be directly passed to cpanm:

cpan-outdated | cpanm

There are some modules that I need for every Perl installation that I'm working with, and I've bundled them into Task::BeLike::hanekomu. So after brewing a new version of perl, I'll do:

cpanm Task::BeLike::hanekomu

and get all the absolute necessities like App::Ack, App::Rgit, Devel::NYTProf and so on.

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posted at: 15:56 | path: /cpan_gems | permalink | 2 comments | 0 trackbacks

john napiorkowski wrote at 2010-07-16 17:48:

This is really useful, I'm going to share it with my team. Just one correction. After you install perlbrew you need to adjust your $PATH so the perlbrew application file can be found, typically by adding "~/perl5/perlbrew/bin" in you .bashrc or however you do it on your platform of choice.

:m) wrote at 2010-07-19 14:21:

thank you. I was not able to brew a 5.8.1, but 5.8.9 was successful. Perhaps include a link to an online directory where users can browse for available versions of perl.

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