How can I package up my Perl app's dependencies for deployment?

Question

I'm working on a Perl app that's intended to be deployed using Module::Build. I've need to install a number of modules through CPAN because they weren't available through Ubuntu's package manager—or, more correctly, the internal apt-get mirror all our servers use. While this is all well and good on our development server, IT is (understandably) reluctant to run code on production machines that isn't cached or otherwise controlled in-house.

As we don't currently have a CPAN mirror, this basically means that I need to get all of these non-Ubuntu modules into one place so they can be archived and/or committed to version control. The ideal solution would be to check the utility out from source control, change a couple config variables for databases and such, maybe run a build/install command, and be done. Fortunately, the development server is a clone of the production server, so modules using XS or other architecture-specific features shouldn't cause an issue.

I think the cleanest way to handle this would be checking in source tarballs for the modules I need and setting Module::Build to use those to resolve its dependencies instead of looking to CPAN, but I don't see an option for that. Is this something that's doable, or is there another way to round up all the modules I need for an essentially offline deployment?

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments above, Pinto may suit your needs as it creates your own CPAN repo.

Pinto has two primary goals. First, Pinto seeks to address the problem of instability in the CPAN mirrors. Distribution archives are constantly added and removed from the CPAN, so if you use it to build a system or application, you may not get the same result twice. Second, Pinto seeks to encourage developers to use the CPAN toolchain for building, testing, and dependency management of their own local software, even if they never plan to release it to the CPAN.

Pinto accomplishes these goals by providing tools for creating and managing your own custom repositories of distribution archives. These repositories can contain any distribution archives you like, and can be used with the standard CPAN toolchain. The tools also support various operations that enable you to deal with common problems that arise during the development process.

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Second Answer

Alternatively, if you are only going to deploy to Ubuntu, you can turn CPAN modules - and your own into Debian packages with dh-make-perl. You can then host them in your own repo with reprepro. The beauty of this is that you can update the packages and do a

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

on the client machines, so long as they have your own repo as a source

Answer 2

Check out Stratopan and Carton.

Also see:

• Deploying Perl Application
• How can I manage Perl module dependencies?

Answer 3

I'm not sure how common it is, but I've been using perlbrew and Pinto together to solve some of the issues you are talking about.

1. With perlbrew, I'm not interacting with the "system" perl. There is an application perl and a system perl, and there is no risk of me installing a later version of a module that somehow interferes with something the system perl was doing.

2. With Pinto, I have archived versions of the CPAN modules that I know will work.

When I deploy, I build a perlbrew perl (with an alias like "prod" or something) and then I install all the necessary modules into that perlbrew perl using the Pinto repository. I currently facilitate this with a cpan bundle module (that module also goes into the Pinto repo) so you can just install the bundle from the repository and it automatically puts all your dependencies in.