Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Creating a MiniCPAN

You can mirror CPAN yourself, but as we write this, you’d have to sync 24,000 distributions taking up 13 GB of disk space. Since PAUSE only indexes the latest distributions, you probably won’t need most of those distributions. For most uses, you’ll probably only ever install the latest versions. Because of this, in 2002, Randal Schwartz created minicpan and wrote about it in Linux Magazine.^[182]. He reduced his local CPAN footprint by 80%, and brian d foy coined the term Schwartz Factor to measure that reduction.

The CPAN::Mini distribution has the tools you need. This module is not part of the Standard Library, so you have to install it yourself (see later in this chapter).

First, set up your configuration, noting from where you want to fetch new data and where you want to store it:

local: /Users/Amelia/MINICPAN
remote: http://cpan.example.com/

Running minicpan creates the slim repository:

% minicpan
Using config from /Users/Amelia/.minicpanrc
Updating /Users/Amelia/MINICPAN
Mirroring from http://cpan.example.com/
===============================================================
authors/01mailrc.txt.gz ... updated
modules/02packages.details.txt.gz ... updated
modules/03modlist.data.gz ... updated
authors/id/A/AA/AAR/Math–Clipper–1.01.tar.gz ... updated
authors/id/A/AA/AAR/CHECKSUMS ... updated

Point your CPAN clients at this repository, and you can now install modules even if you are on a train, plane, or automobile, in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, or even in ...