Dancer::Manual::Developers - Steps to follow to hack on Dancer
version 1.9999_01
This document is for developers. If you want to try out Dancer, hack it a bit, fix bugs, improve documentations, provide patches, etc. , you need to be able to build it and understand some basic stuff. This document tries to help in this regard.
Go to http://git-scm.com, and get a git client for your platform
Go to https://github.com/PerlDancer/Dancer2. Then you can either grab a tarball, or clone read-only, or fork the project.
I recommend you to fork the project into your github account, so that you can go write modifications, and provide patches (Pull Requests) to upstream easily.
So go on and click on the Fork button. Then git clone your Dancer forked repo.
You need Perl, and Dist::Zilla, and a few additional modules. This section describes how to get to a point where all the test passes and Dancer is usable, starting from nothing, using Perlbrew.
Perlbrew allows you to have multiple version of Perl on your system, alongside your system built-in Perl. It's very handy, and doesn't require administration permissions.
Go to http://perlbrew.pl/ and follow the instructions to install the perlbrew program.
perlbrew
Now you need to pick up a version of Perl you'll install. Depending on what the current stable version is, the following line will have to be adapted. At the time of writing.
To see which version of perl is available, use:
# perlbrew available perl-5.17.1 perl-5.16.0 perl-5.14.2 perl-5.12.4 perl-5.10.1 perl-5.8.9 perl-5.6.2 perl5.005_04 perl5.004_05 perl5.003_07
Then go on and install a version inside Perlbrew. I recommend you give a name to the installation (--as option), as well as compiling without the tests (--n option) to speed it up.
--as
--n
perlbrew install -n perl-5.14.2 --as dancer_development -j 3
Wait a while, and it should be done. Switch to your new Perl with:
perlbrew switch dancer_development
Now you are using the fresh Perl, you can check it with:
which perl
To be able to easily and quickly install Perl modules, I recommend using cpanm
cpanm
perlbrew install-cpanm
Dancer uses Dist::Zilla ( http://dzil.org/ ). Dist::Zilla is a program to make it easier to write, package, manage, and release free software.
However, it's not built in Perl, so let's install it:
cpanm -n Dist::Zilla
That will take some time, but should install properly.
After that is done, you should be able to launch dzil:
dzil
# dzil Available commands: commands: list the application's commands help: display a command's help screen authordeps: list your distribution's author dependencies build: build your dist clean: clean up after build, test, or install install: install your dist listdeps: print your distribution's prerequisites new: mint a new dist nop: do nothing: initialize dzil, then exit release: release your dist run: run stuff in a dir where your dist is built setup: set up a basic global config file smoke: smoke your dist test: test your dist
If that's the case, all's good.
The Dancer sources come with a dist.ini. That's the configuration files for Dist::Zilla, so that it knows how to build Dancer. However, in this configuration files, we use several Dist::Zilla plugins, that are not yet installed. Let's do that with:
dist.ini
Dist::Zilla
dzil authordeps | cpanm -n
That should install a bunch of stuff
Now that Dist::Zilla is up and running, you should install the dependencies required by Dancer:
dzil listdeps | cpanm -n
When that is done, you're good to go !
Launching the Dancer test suite is easy:
dzil test
Dancer Core Developers
This software is copyright (c) 2012 by Alexis Sukrieh.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
To install Dancer, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm Dancer
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Dancer
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.