Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

ExtUtils::MakeMaker

Writes a Makefile for module installation. Provides a function, WriteMakefile, which creates an object with attributes that are set from various sources and that actually write the Makefile. See Chapter 2 for information about the using the Makefile and MakeMaker during module installation. This section explains the details of actually creating the Makefile with MakeMaker. It assumes an understanding of make and Makefiles.

If you are a Perl programmer writing a module, you should run h2xs to generate the template for your module. Among other things, h2xs creates a file called Makefile.PL, and it’s Makefile.PL that runs MakeMaker. On the other hand, if you are installing a module, you can usually just run the Makefile.PL that came with the module, perhaps adding a PREFIX argument if you are installing the module locally (see Chapter 2). In either case, you shouldn’t need to run ExtUtils::MakeMaker directly unless you have special requirements.

A typical call to MakeMaker might look like this example from the CGI distribution:

use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
WriteMakefile(
        NAME => "CGI",
        DISTNAME => "CGI-modules",
        VERSION => "2.76",
        linkext => { LINKTYPE => '' },
        dist => {COMPRESS=>'gzip -9f', SUFFIX => 'gz'},
);

MakeMaker attributes can be passed as arguments to WriteMakefile, as in the example, or they can be passed as name=value pairs on the command line:

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/mydir/Perl/Modules

To see what MakeMaker is doing, you can say:

perl Makefile.PL verbose ...