There are numerous articles that come up, say, on a Google search of “Perl non root,” and these would be the best place to start.

I freely admit that it is “somewhat voodoo.”   Techniques have evolved over time so you should look only at fairly-recent articles.   This is, shall we say, “a place where ‘TMTOWTDI’ is not necessarily such a wonderful thing.”   But once you get the magickal spells just right, it works very well indeed.

Anytime I install a Perl-based web site, for instance, and for public or internal-only use, I always set up the virtual-host so that the CPAN modules that I need to use are fetched only from a site-specific local library of my choosing.   Web hosting companies apply software updates too, and any unrecognized dependencies can break a site.   This practice greatly reduces such concerns.