Perl Hacks

Hack #40. Package Standalone Perl Applications

Distribute a full Perl application to users.

The three main ways to distribute an application are via an installer, via a standalone executable, or via source. These choices vary a lot across platforms. Windows users prefer installers, especially .msi files. Mac fans are quite happy with .app files, which usually come in disk images. Most Linux variants use installers (.deb and .rpm) but others prefer source.

What if your application is a Perl program?

Perl may seem like an atypical GUI language, but it does have bindings for GUI toolkits including Tk, wxWidgets, Qt, and GTK. Perl can be useful in the GUI realm as a rapid-development foundation or simply to add a couple of dialogs to a mostly background process. One great entry barrier, however, is that most platforms do not bundle these GUI toolkits with Perl—and some platforms do not bundle Perl at all. Though there are packaged distributions of Perl itself, the add-on modules that usually accompany any sophisticated Perl project are typically source code. This poses a problem for most Windows users and many Mac users for whom this is too low-level a task. Only the sysadmin-rich world of Linux and Unix regularly tolerates sudo cpan install Foo commands.

The Hack

The PAR project attempts to to create a solution to bundling the myriad files that usually compose a Perl application into a manageable monolith. PAR files are simply ZIP files with manifests. If you have PAR installed on ...