Recently I got myself a new phone. And, as one does, I installed Termux on it, to have a unix-ish environment for when I need it.

Then, of course, I went to configure Perl and install some modules I'd like there. As this was not my first time doing so, I thought about listing all the modules I want in a cpanfile and then using App::cpanminus to install these, making the process far more reproducible.

But that required some non-Perl prerequisites, like the C compiler, make and perl itself. And of course, also bootstrapping App::cpanminus.

Then I thought a bit on how to combine this setup into a single file. This is what I came up with. It's a cpanfile that doubles as shell script.

#!/bin/bash

# This will install cpanminus and then the Perl modules
# as listed at the end of this script. To run use
# the following commands:
#
# chmod ugo+x ./cpanfile && ./cpanfile
#

eval '
pkg install git perl make clang

if ! cpanm --help 2>&1 >/dev/null ; then
    curl -L https://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus
fi

DIR=$(dirname "$0")
cpanm --installdeps --notest --cpanfile "$DIR"

exit
'
if 0;

requires 'Mojolicious';
requires 'DBIx::Spreadsheet';
#requires 'App::sqldisplay'; # to be released on CPAN
requires 'DBIx::RunSQL';
[download]

Why not the other way around? Because I could not find a way to make cpanm take a file with a different name than cpanfile :)

The cpanfile is also available on Github, if you want to copy it.