What is CPAN?

CPAN = Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

But that "word" is used in many contexts

A module distribution infrastructure

There's Perl Author's Upload Server for uploading modules, and lots of mirrors from which you can download modules.

A website

There are multiple websites that you can use when searching for perl modules, and when viewing documentation and of modules. Among the popular ones are http://search.cpan.org/, http://kobesearch.cpan.org/ and https://metacpan.org/. The latter also provides a rich HTTP-based API, which is very good for automating CPAN-related data analysis.

Module Installers

CPAN.pm comes with the cpan command line tool, CPANPLUS has cpanp, App::cpanminus ships with cpanm.

Those clients need a CPAN mirror (either online or a local mirror). All of them work with any mirror, though cpanm talks to a "cpanmetadb" server (not the same as metacpan.org) to find distributions (but it can work offline with a local CPAN mirror too).

My personal favorites are cpanm (because it works so well, and doesn't produce loads of output that bores me), and search.cpan.org and metacpan.org as web interfaces.

Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to What is CPAN? Re: cpan vs metacpan by moritz
in thread cpan vs metacpan by Steve_BZ

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