Folks,

I have to install about 10 modules from CPAN on a machine to get an application going. Since the machine does not have an internet connection, I transfered the archived modules to it and installed them manually, with lots of 'perl Makefile.PL' and all that.

Is there already a way to automate this process ? I could write a bash script (or even better, a small Perl program ;-) to do the installations but surely there's already at least one solution out there,

Amongst the undoubtly many solutions, which one would you recommened ? This is for Linux-only systems. One nice criteria would be that the solution does not require itself 10 modules to run...

Thanks !

Update:

On CPAN I found megadistro, a recent package that, after a fe wtries, seems to successfully get from the CPAN specified modules, build them, and produce either a RPM, a Debian, or simply a tar.gz package.

I've chosen the tar.gz option for testing since this is part of the requirements.

My CPAN(PLUS) module(s) are set to operate as root. So far, I did not look into making it work as an ordinary user. So, to use megadistro I logged in as root. Warning: megadistro will not create the /root/.megadistro directory to put the archive file of all the modules. You have to create it beforehand.

1) I've created a text file with a few module names: 

Acme::Bleach
Acme::EyeDrops
Acme::BadExample

[download]

2) I've created some test directories for megadistro to operate: 

~/MegaDistro/mega_build/
~/MegaDistro/mega_dl/
~/MegaDistro/mega_extract/

[download]

3) I've launched megadistro like this, to produce a tar.gz file: 

megadistro --build-only \
--modlist=~/MegaDistro/megadistro.list \
--fetchdir=~/MegaDistro/mega_dl \
--extractdir=~/MegaDistro/mega_extract \
--builddir=~/MegaDistro/mega_build

[download]

Megadistro then spent some time at the following line (on a X86_64 dual core fast machine it stayed there foreover, so I killed it, but on a plain x86 it works fine):

Rebuilding module indicies...

It then produced the following file in /root/.megadistro:

megadistro-20060303.tar.gz

And this archive file contains stuff like: 

usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6/i586-linux-thread-multi/auto/Acme/Blea
+ch
usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6/Acme/Bleach.pm
usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6/Acme/EyeDrops.pm
usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6/Acme/BadExample.pm
usr/share/man/man3/Acme::Bleach.3pm
usr/share/man/man3/Acme::EyeDrops.3pm
(so on so forth...)

[download]

So, it looks good. When megadistro hits a problem testing an application, it will interactively ask for forcing the install (Y/n). Could be a good idea to specify this as a parameter. It will also, or so it seems, download from the CPAN the dependencies.

Let us know if you try it too !

In reply to Repeated offline installs of same CPAN modules by carcassonne

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