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App-cpanminus-0.9912
River stage two • 42 direct dependents • 52 total dependents
281 ++
/ App::cpanminus

NAME

App::cpanminus - get, unpack, build and install modules from CPAN

SYNOPSIS

    cpanm Module
    cpanm MIYAGAWA/Plack-1.0000.tar.gz
    cpanm ~/mydists/MyCompany-Framework-1.0.tar.gz
    cpanm http://example.com/MyModule-0.1.tar.gz
    cpanm http://github.com/miyagawa/Tatsumaki/tarball/master
    cpanm --interactive Task::Kensho

Run cpanm -h for more options.

DESCRIPTION

cpanminus is a script to get, unpack, build and install modules from CPAN.

Its catch? Deps-free, zero-conf, standalone but maintainable and extensible with plugins and shell scripting friendly. In the runtime it only requires 10MB of RAM.

INSTALLATION

There are Debian package, RPM, FreeBSD ports and packages for other operation systems available. If you want to use the package maangement system, search for cpanminus and use the appropriate command to install. This makes it easy to install cpanm to your system and later upgrade.

If you want to build the latest from source,

    git clone git://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus.git
    cd cpanminus
    perl Makefile.PL
    make install # or sudo make install if you're non root

This will install cpanm to your bin directory like /usr/local/bin (unless you configured INSTALL_BASE with local::lib), so you might need to sudo. Later you can say cpanm --self-upgrade --sudo to upgrade to the latest version.

Otherwise,

    cd ~/bin
    wget http://xrl.us/cpanm
    chmod +x cpanm
    # edit shebang if you don't have /usr/bin/env

just works, but be sure to grab the new version manually when you upgrade (--self-upgrade might not work).

DEPENDENCIES

perl 5.8 or later (Actually I believe it works with pre 5.8 too but haven't tested).

  • 'tar' executable (if GNU tar, version 1.22 or later) or Archive::Tar to unpack files.

  • C compiler, if you want to build XS modules.

And optionally:

  • make, if you want to reliably install MakeMaker based modules

  • Module::Build (core in 5.10) to install Build.PL based modules

PLUGINS

WARNING: plugin API is not stable so this feature is turned off by default for now. To enable plugins you have to be savvy enough to look at the build.log or read the source code to see how :)

cpanminus core is a compact and simple 1000 lines of code (with some embedded utilities and documents) but can be extended by writing plugins. Plugins are flat perl scripts that should be placed inside ~/.cpanm/plugins. You can copy (or symlink, if you're a developer) a plugin file to the directory to enable plugins, and delete the file to disable.

See plugins/ directory in the git repository http://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus for the list of available and sample plugins.

QUESTIONS

Another CPAN installer?

OK, the first motivation was this: CPAN shell gets OOM (or swaps heavily and gets really slow) on Slicehost/linode's most affordable plan with only 256MB RAM. Should I pay more to install perl modules from CPAN? I don't think so.

But why a new client?

First of all, I don't have an intention to dis CPAN or CPANPLUS developers. Don't get me wrong. They're great tools and I've been using it for literally years (Oh, you know how many modules I have on CPAN, right?) I really respect their efforts of maintaining the most important tools in the CPAN toolchain ecosystem.

However, I've learned that for less experienced users (mostly from outside the Perl community), or even really experienced Perl developers who knows how to shoot in their feet, setting up the CPAN toolchain could often feel really yak shaving, especially when all they want to do is just install some modules and start writing some perl code.

In particular, here are the few issues I've been observing:

  • Too many questions. No sane defaults. Normal user doesn't (and shouldn't have to) know what's the right answer for the question Parameters for the 'perl Build.PL' command? []

  • Very noisy output by default.

  • Fetches and rebuilds indexes like every day and takes like a minute

  • ... and hogs 200MB of memory and thrashes/OOMs on my 256MB VPS

And cpanminus is designed to be very quiet (but logs all output to ~/.cpanm/build.log), pick whatever the sanest defaults as possible without asking any questions to just work.

Note that most of these problems with existing tools are rare, or are just overstated and might be already fixed issues, or can be configured to work nicer. For instance the latest CPAN.pm dev release has a much better FirstTime experience than previously.

And I know there's a reason for them to have many options and questions, since they're meant to work everywhere for everybody.

And yes, of course I should have contributed back to CPAN/CPANPLUS instead of writing a new client, but CPAN.pm is nearly impossibler (for anyone other than andk or xdg) to maintain (that's why CPANPLUS was born, right?) and CPANPLUS is a huge beast for me to start working on.

Are you on drugs?

Yeah, I think my brain has been damaged since I looked at PyPI, gemcutter, pip and rip. They're quite nice and I really wanted something as nice for CPAN which I love.

How does this thing work?

So, imagine you don't have CPAN or CPANPLUS. What you're going to do is to search the module on the CPAN search site, download a tarball, unpack it and then run perl Makefile.PL (or perl Build.PL). If the module has dependencies you probably have to recursively resolve those dependencies by hand before doing so. And then run the unit tests and make install (or ./Build install).

This script just automates that.

Zero-conf? How does this module get/parse/update the CPAN index?

It scrapes the site http://search.cpan.org/. Yes, it's horrible and fragile. I hope (and have already talked to) QA/toolchain people for building a queriable CPAN DB website so I can stop scraping.

Fetched files are unpacked in ~/.cpanm but you can configure with PERL_CPANM_HOME environment variable.

Where does this install modules to? Do I need a root access?

It installs to wherever ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build are configured to (i.e. via PERL_MM_OPT and MODULEBUILDRC). So if you use local::lib then it installs to your local perl5 directory. Otherwise it installs to siteperl directory.

cpanminus at a boot time checks whether you configured local::lib setup, or have the permission to install modules to the sitelib directory, and warns you otherwise so that you need to run cpanm command as root, or run with --sudo option to auto sudo when running the install command. Yes, it's already in the plan to automatically bootstraps local::lib at the initial launch if you're non-root. I'm working on it with local::lib developers -- Stay tuned.

Does this really work?

I tested installing MojoMojo, Task::Kensho, KiokuDB, Catalyst, Jifty and Plack using cpanminus and the installations including dependencies were mostly successful. So multiplies of half of CPAN behave really nicely and appear to work.

However, there might be some distributions that will miserably fail, because of the nasty edge case, a.k.a. bad distros. Here are some examples:

  • Packages uploaded to PAUSE in 90's and doesn't live under the standard authors/id/A/AA directory hierarchy.

  • Makefile.PL or Build.PL that asks you questions without using prompt function. However cpanminus has a mechanism to kill those questions with a timeout, and you can always say --interactive to make the configuration interactive.

  • Distributions that are not shipped with META.yml file but requires some specific version of toolchain in the configuration time.

  • Distributions that tests SIGNATURE in the *.t unit tests and has MANIFEST.SKIP file in the distribution at the same time. Signature testing is for the security and running it in unit tests is too late since we run Makefile.PL in the configuration time. cpanminus has verity_signature plugin to verify the dist before configurations.

  • Distributions that has a META.yml file that is encoded in YAML 1.1 format using YAML::XS. This will be eventually solved once we move to META.json.

Well in other words, cpanminus is aimed to work against 99.9% of modules on CPAN for 99.9% of people. It may not be perfect, but it should just work in most cases.

If this tool doesn't work for your very rare environment, then I'm sorry, but you should use CPAN or CPANPLUS, or build and install modules manually.

That sounds fantastic. Should I switch to this from CPAN(PLUS)?

If you've got CPAN or CPANPLUS working then you may want to keep using CPAN or CPANPLUS in the longer term, but I just hope this can be a quite handy alternative to them for people in other situations. And apparently, many people love (at least the idea of) this software :)

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2010- Tatsuhiko Miyagawa

The standalone executable contains the following modules embedded.

LICENSE

Same as Perl.

CREDITS

CONTRIBUTORS

Patches and code improvements were contributed by:

Goro Fuji, Kazuhiro Osawa, Tokuhiro Matsuno, Kenichi Ishigaki, Ian Wells, Pedro Melo, Masayoshi Sekimura, Matt S Trout, squeeky, horus and Ingy dot Net.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Bug reports, suggestions and feedbacks were sent by, or general acknowledgement goes to:

Jesse Vincent, David Golden, Andreak Koenig, Jos Boumans, Chris Williams, Adam Kennedy, Audrey Tang, J. Shirley, Chris Prather, Jesse Luehrs, Marcus Ramberg, Shawn M Moore, chocolateboy, Chirs Nehren, Jonathan Rockway, Leon Brocard, Simon Elliott, Ricardo Signes, AEvar Arnfjord Bjarmason, Eric Wilhelm, Florian Ragwitz and xaicron.

COMMUNITY

http://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus - source code repository, issue tracker
irc://irc.perl.org/#toolchain - discussions about Perl toolchain. I'm there.

NO WARRANTY

This software is provided "as-is," without any express or implied warranty. In no event shall the author be held liable for any damages arising from the use of the software.

SEE ALSO

CPAN CPANPLUS pip