If you stay within the typically installed and maintained modules for sites that use CPanel and bundle everything else in the libraries directory of your project (with appropriate adjustments to your use paths, of course) you should be fine for most other servers your target audience will use. Either they'll be on a CPanel or Plesk managed server or they'll have arrangements to do things themselves or to hire it done.

Typically, but not always, I distribute to my clients in two separate archive files. One is the project proper. The other is the dependencies, precompiled with a compatible perl, cc, processor, and OS if they are not pure-perl modules. I keep them separate from the system perl and usually separate from each other in case the projects depend on different interfaces in different versions of the same module. Deployment consists of uploading and extracting the project, and if that doesn't work, uploading and extracting the dependencies in the same folder. If I need anything outside the web root, I make sure the relative paths are saved in the archives.

If your customer are running something like perl 5.6.2 on Irix 6, then they'll know how to do all their own module installations. At least they should, or have access to someone who does.

I'd like to second PAR. Check out Steffen Müller's Application Deployment and Dependency Management with PAR slides (the Frankfurt ones) illustrating PAR, PAR::WebStart and repositories.

Are you familiar with Bugzilla ? It's a bug tracking tool, written in perl. It's a large project and requires lots of modules from CPAN. But it comes with a script called checksetup.pl that automatically detects which ones are missing, and will actually go fetch and install anything that you don't have. You might consider taking a look under the hood and see if there's anyway you could adapt it for your purposes.

Wow! I'd never heard of either of these. Amazing stuff, hope, and wisdom.

Thanks good monks.

—Brad
"The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men." George Eliot

I have a few very complicated doc maintenance type systems- all perl/bash- mostly perl- also CGI::Application head to toe for the gui.

Screw the install like wordpress- using cpan is easier. Btw, I love wordpress, I even install it for clients and friends. I just wget the source, tarxvf, and replace public_html with .. anyhow.. Comparing these things, it's like apples and organges. I say stick with perl/cpan the way it is, don't try to do clever tricks like prepackaging deps, etc. You'll shoot your eye out.

Much of the hosting marketplace precludes the customer from having root access or any pull with those who do. It's true that's the low end of the hosting industry, but what do you think most small businesses that are not part of the industry use? They don't understand the differences, and $5 a month sounds much better than $50 a month to them.

BTW, I assure you I have both my eyes.

BTW, I assure you I have both my eyes.

Fingers and toes? :D

All modules you mention are available, but you would have to check if that applies to every module you require:

libcgi-application-perl
libhtml-template-perl
libhtml-fillinform-perl
libjson-xs-perl
[download]