Re: yast vs cpan

The way I handle this is to use the system packaging tools (yast in your case, apt in mine) to install the distro's packages if possible.

If the module I need either isn't packaged by the distro, or if I want a newer version, I install via cpan, but as my own non-privileged userid.

When you run CPAN as yourself, the questions tell you how to provide additional args to 'perl Makefile.PL' (PREFIX=foo) or 'Build.PL' (--install_base foo) to install in your home directory. I tend to put things in $HOME/install/perl.

Then you tell your shell to tell perl (when run as you) to find these modules:

export PERL5LIB = $PERL5LIB:$HOME/install/perl/share/perl
export PERL5LIB = $PERL5LIB:$HOME/install/perl/lib/perl
[download]

and you can then have the best of both worlds. This won't allow other users (e.g. whatever userid your web server runs as) on your box to run the modules, but you can fix that by setting PERL5LIB to refer to your homedir install in that environment too (and check the file permissions work out).

This also works nicely in the multiple-machine one-NFS-homedir setup.

Comment on Re: yast vs cpan Download Code

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Re^2: yast vs cpan by elnino2007 (Novice) on Nov 09, 2006 at 19:19 UTC
wow, you guys are fast. jbert, these are for the webserver, so, in that case what would you do?	[reply]
Re^3: yast vs cpan by jbert (Priest) on Nov 09, 2006 at 21:26 UTC
Hmmm....probably as described. Using the distro packages as far as possible helps keep you up to date on security fixes etc (as long as you are running your update commands). If you do need something not packaged by your distro, set up a localised install tree as described above. I'd probably create a user 'cpan' to own it and install the modules to its homedir. If I was very paranoid, I'd actually install to /home/cpan/install/perl, check everything worked and then copy (rsync) the ~/install/perl to wherever I had configured the web server to pick them up from (somewhere not under your document root, obviously). Note: you generally don't set environment variables for CGIs etc in .bash_profile for your web server user, but how you do it is web-server specific. The apache docs cover setting env vars pretty well. Have fun and good luck.	[reply]


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