Perl for Web Site Management

Installing the Module

Now, to put this into action, we need to save this module file as Rutabagas.pm and stick it in a directory called Walnuts, which in turn is contained in one of Perl’s library directories. If we don’t have write access to the library directories for our server’s Perl installation, we can stick it in our own personal library directory, making sure to stick an appropriate use lib statement in our script before trying to use the module, as described in Chapter 11.

Making Modules with h2xs

If you want to make modules that can install themselves like the ones you download from CPAN, or if you just want some extra help setting up your modules, you should look into using the h2xs utility. This command-line program, which comes bundled with Perl, makes it a snap to set up a new module. You just enter something like the following at the command line:

[jbc@andros tmp]$ h2xs -XA -n Walnuts::Rutabagas
Writing Walnuts/Rutabagas/Rutabagas.pm
Writing Walnuts/Rutabagas/Makefile.PL
Writing Walnuts/Rutabagas/README
Writing Walnuts/Rutabagas/test.pl
Writing Walnuts/Rutabagas/Changes
Writing Walnuts/Rutabagas/MANIFEST

This will create not only a skeleton module file (Rutabagas.pm) containing all the parts (and more) shown in this chapter’s example, but it will also create all the little bits and pieces that a well-formed Perl module should have in order to be properly distributed, along with its documentation.

See the h2xs manpage and the perlxstut manpage (via man perlxstut