Hello there,

Please accept my apology if this has been covered somewhere; I did a brief search through CPAN, Google, Google groups, the Perl FAQ, and this site, but I can't really think of a good set of keywords that will yield appropriate results.

I've been working on a script that will need to be installed in several different places. I want to automate this process. Since I'm reasonably comfortable in Perl, and since Perl seems suited to the task, a Perl install script seems like a reasonable approach.

My installation process will involve:

• some detection of the environment (i.e., where is Perl installed);
• copying files to several directories;
• prompting for some user values (i.e., name of this system, do you want to set up X, etc.);
• substituting text within the files;
• setting file permissions;
• (optional) I'd love if this worked through a web/CGI interface, since it might be a bit of a pain to convert it (in the case of error messages from the shell, etc.)
• (less important) Finally, eventually I'd like to be able to do this install process over FTP. If there's a model or module that incorporates this functionality, I'd love to use that. I'm doing web programming for a number of clients on different servers, and so FTP installation would be quite handy.

My question is this: is there a good model or prototype install script that does all this, which I can modify/customize for my own use? Or is there a module/library designed for this task that will make all this easy? As I said, I'm not sure how best to even search for all this. Of course I could just code everything myself, but I'd prefer not to reinvent the wheel here.

Although the general Perl installation procedure seems start with "make", and then use a Perl "install" to copy files, I'd like to do everything with Perl. If this is a terrible idea, please let me know, but I've got most of the actual tasks listed and I think Perl will be fine for all of it. Also, I learned a version of "make" a number of years ago, and have no real desire to revisit or deepen my knowledge of it.

I'm a fan of the automated WordPress install process, and would love something like that to start with (WordPress is in PHP, and I'm not really interested in PHP).

(I would consider a Python script, in case any of you are multilingual in that particular way, but I'm way less familiar with Python - I just find the language attractive and have dabbled in it.)