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Perlbrew

perlbrew is an admin-free perl installation management tool. The latest version is 0.88, read the release note: Release 0.88.

Install, quickly

Copy & Paste this line into your terminal:

\curl -L https://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

Or, if your system does not have curl but something else:

# Linux
\wget -O - https://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

# FreeBSD
\fetch -o- https://install.perlbrew.pl | sh

If you prefer to install with cpan, there are two steps:

sudo cpan App::perlbrew
perlbrew init

If it is installed with cpan, the perlbrew executable should be installed as /usr/bin/perlbrew or /usr/local/bin/perlbrew. For all users who want to use perlbrew, a prior perlbrew init needs to be executed.

The default perlbrew root directory is ~/perl5/perlbrew, which can be changed by setting PERLBREW_ROOT environment variable before the installation and initialization. For more advanced installation process, please read the perlbrew document.

Install, other ways

If you use Sparrow there is sparrow plugin named perlbrew to install perlbrew. It's poorly tested but proved to be working for Ubuntu/Debian platforms.

What is perlbrew

perlbrew is a tool to manage multiple perl installations in your $HOME directory. They are completely isolated perl universes. This approach has many benefits:

• No need to run sudo to install CPAN modules, any more.
• Try the monthly released new perls.
• Learn new language features.
• Test your production code against different perl versions.
• Leave vendor perl (the one that comes with OS) alone
  • Vendor perl usually serves its own purposes, and it might be a bad idea to mess it up too much.
  • Especially PITA when trying to upgrade system perl.
  • Some vendors introduced their own perl bugs, twice!
• Hacking perl internals.
• Just to keep up with fashion.

While the default is good enough, you may customize it to install to alternative places, or even let multiple users share the whole perlbrew environment.

perlbrew is simple

To install the latest stable release, and use it permanently:

perlbrew install perl-5.16.0
perlbrew switch perl-5.16.0

To play with the bleeding-edge version, but only in the current shell:

perlbrew install perl-blead
perlbrew use perl-blead

Runs myprogram.pl against all installations of perl, especially helpful when running tests:

perlbrew exec perl myprogram.pl

For more descriptions about commands,

perlbrew help

Articles

• Perlbrew Configuration
• Reinstall All Modules On New Perl
• Install a sitecustomize.pl file with perlbrew
• Perlbrew 中文簡介
• Perlbrew development and the git flow
• Perlbrew In Shell Scripts
• Perlbrew and Friends
• FixLion Read this if you having issue build new perl on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)

More Articles

• Runing a perl program via cron by @john_bokma
• FreeBSD9 に Perl 環境をインストール
• Making Homebrew work with Perlbrew
• How to Install Perlbrew and Manage Multiple Versions of Perl 5 on CentOS 7 | DigitalOcean
• perlbrewで構築するPerl環境 by @suesan
• Getting started with Perlbrew
• Managing Multiple Perl 5 Installations with Perlbrew (BSD Magazine, Volume 12, n. 1, issue 01/2018)

Development

perlbrew has always been improving, it is an open source project for everyone to participate. There are currently over 80 contributors and growing. The code repository is located on github. Feel free to send a bug report, a pull request, or a beer. Everything helps :)