CPAN help

gwhite has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

A client is trying to load modules with CPAN behind a firewall. FTP is blocked, and I had him add an http address to the urllist and that also did not work. The documentation for CPAN says:

To access servers outside these types of firewalls with perl (even for ftp) you will need to use LWP.

How does one do that within the CPAN shell?

Thanks

g_White

Comment on CPAN help

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Re: CPAN help by clemburg (Curate) on Aug 09, 2001 at 17:52 UTC
This is not an issue of how to use the CPAN shell, but which modules come preinstalled at your site. The usual solution for using CPAN behind firewalls is: have LWP modules preinstalled (e.g., from a CPAN CD or Linux distribution CD) set the http_proxy and ftp_proxy environment variables to something like "http://proxy.mydomain.com:8080" just use the CPAN shell like before Christian Lemburg Brainbench MVP for Perl http://www.brainbench.com	[reply]
Re: CPAN help by trantor (Chaplain) on Aug 09, 2001 at 17:58 UTC
Check the configuration section in the CPAN module documentation (`perldoc CPAN`). There's also a section regarding CPAN and firewalls. In a nutshell, you can define your own `$HOME/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm` where you can specify a proxy for your HTTP requests. You should also be able to set the `http_proxy` environment variable to instruct `CPAN` to use it. Moreover, many HTTP proxies also act as FTP proxies, so you might want to try with `ftp_proxy` too. Anyway, check the documentation and you'll find many ways (there's more than one way to do it, even when configuring) to access CPAN behind a firewall. Happy `{perl -MCPAN -eshell}`ing! -- TMTOWTDI	[reply] [d/l] [select]