App::perlbrew - Manage perl installations in your $HOME

# Installation
curl -L https://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

# Initialize
perlbrew init

# See what is available
perlbrew available

# Install some Perls
perlbrew install 5.18.2
perlbrew install perl-5.8.1
perlbrew install perl-5.19.9

# See what were installed
perlbrew list

# Swith to an installation and set it as default
perlbrew switch perl-5.18.2

# Temporarily use another version only in current shell.
perlbrew use perl-5.8.1
perl -v

# Or turn it off completely. Useful when you messed up too deep.
# Or want to go back to the system Perl.
perlbrew off

# Use 'switch' command to turn it back on.
perlbrew switch perl-5.12.2

# Exec something with all perlbrew-ed perls
perlbrew exec -- perl -E 'say $]'

perlbrew is a program to automate the building and installation of perl in an easy way. It provides multiple isolated perl environments, and a mechanism for you to switch between them.

Everything are installed unter ~/perl5/perlbrew. You then need to include a bashrc/cshrc provided by perlbrew to tweak the PATH for you. You then can benefit from not having to run sudo commands to install cpan modules because those are installed inside your HOME too.

For the documentation of perlbrew usage see perlbrew command on MetaCPAN, or by running perlbrew help, or by visiting perlbrew's official website. The following documentation features the API of App::perlbrew module, and may not be remotely close to what your want to read.

It is the simplest to use the perlbrew installer, just paste this statement to your terminal:

curl -L https://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

Or this one, if you have fetch (default on FreeBSD):

fetch -o- https://install.perlbrew.pl | sh

After that, perlbrew installs itself to ~/perl5/perlbrew/bin, and you should follow the instruction on screen to modify your shell rc file to put it in your PATH.

The installed perlbrew command is a standalone executable that can be run with system perl. The minimum system perl version requirement is 5.8.0, which should be good enough for most of the OSes these days.

A fat-packed version of patchperl is also installed to ~/perl5/perlbrew/bin, which is required to build old perls.

The directory ~/perl5/perlbrew will contain all install perl executables, libraries, documentations, lib, site_libs. In the documentation, that directory is referred as perlbrew root. If you need to set it to somewhere else because, say, your HOME has limited quota, you can do that by setting PERLBREW_ROOT environment variable before running the installer:

export PERLBREW_ROOT=/opt/perl5
curl -L https://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

As a result, different users on the same machine can all share the same perlbrew root directory (although only original user that made the installation would have the permission to perform perl installations.)

You may also install perlbrew from CPAN:

cpan App::perlbrew

In this case, the perlbrew command is installed as /usr/bin/perlbrew or /usr/local/bin/perlbrew or others, depending on the location of your system perl installation.

Please make sure not to run this with one of the perls brewed with perlbrew. It's the best to turn perlbrew off before you run that, if you're upgrading.

perlbrew off
cpan App::perlbrew

You should always use system cpan (like /usr/bin/cpan) to install App::perlbrew because it will be installed under a system PATH like /usr/bin, which is not affected by perlbrew switch or use command.

The self-upgrade command will not upgrade the perlbrew installed by cpan command, but it is also easy to upgrade perlbrew by running cpan App::perlbrew again.

• (Str) current_perl

  Return the "current perl" object attribute string, or, if absent, the value of PERLBREW_PERL environment variable.

• (Str) current_perl (Str)

  Set the current_perl object attribute to the given value.

perlbrew project uses github https://github.com/gugod/App-perlbrew/issues and RT https://rt.cpan.org/Dist/Display.html?Queue=App-perlbrew for issue tracking. Issues sent to these two systems will eventually be reviewed and handled.

See https://github.com/gugod/App-perlbrew/contributors for a list of project contributors.

Kang-min Liu <[email protected]>

Copyright (c) 2010-2016 Kang-min Liu <[email protected]>.

The MIT License

BECAUSE THIS SOFTWARE IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE SOFTWARE, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE SOFTWARE "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE SOFTWARE IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE SOFTWARE PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR, OR CORRECTION.

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