Ways to share your distribution code with other users.
Now that you’ve created your distribution, you’re probably ready to share it. While it is perfectly reasonable to create private distributions solely to organize the code in large private projects, it’s more common to build distributions so that they can be used by multiple projects. This guide discusses the various ways that you can share your distribution with the world.
The simplest way (from the author’s perspective) to share a distribution for other developers’ use is to distribute it in source code form. If you place the full source code for your distribution on a public git repository (often, though not always, this means sharing it via GitHub), then other users can install it with cpanm’s git functionality.
For example, you can install the latest code for the Path::Tiny distribution
by running
cpanm https://github.com/dagolden/Path-Tiny.git
Installing a distribution directly from a git repository is an additional
feature of cpanm tool. At the moment, it’s not possible to do the same with
original cpan command or specify a git repository as a dependency of another
distribution.
If you want to control who can install a distribution, or directly track the activity surrounding a distribution, then you’ll want to set up a private CPAN-like server. You can set up your own server (e.g. using Pinto or OrePAN2) or use a commercial service such as Stratopan.
The simplest way to distribute your code for public consumption is to
upload the distribution to CPAN. Distributions published there can be
installed via the cpan or cpanm commands and can be easily required by
other distributions as dependencies.
To begin, you’ll need to create an account on PAUSE. PAUSE stands for “The [Perl programming] Authors Upload Server. After creating the account, you can log in at the PAUSE site and upload your distribution tarball manually.
Alternatively, if you used Minilla for authoring your distribution,
publishing is even simpler! First, install a few necessary modules (cpanm
Version::Next CPAN::Uploader), then publishing is as simple as running one
command:
$ minil release
Contratulations! Your new distribution is now ready for any Perl user in the world to install!
It is a good practice to include Changes file with your distribution. It
contains a description of every released version. This time, we had the file
pre-created by Minilla, it only contained one line saying this is the initial
version of our distribution. Next time when you’re releasing the next version
of your distribution, be sure to have your improvements listed under
{{$NEXT}} line (Minilla will take care of the rest).
If you have multiple maintainers for your distribution, you can give your fellow maintainers permission to push the distribution to CPAN through adding a co-maintainer at the PAUSE website.