cpanm

CPANM(1p) User Contributed Perl Documentation CPANM(1p)

NAME
cpanm - get, unpack build and install modules from CPAN

SYNOPSIS
cpanm Test::More # install Test::More
cpanm MIYAGAWA/Plack-0.99_05.tar.gz # full distribution path
cpanm http://example.org/LDS/CGI.pm-3.20.tar.gz # install from URL
cpanm ~/dists/MyCompany-Enterprise-1.00.tar.gz # install from a local file
cpanm --interactive Task::Kensho # Configure interactively
cpanm . # install from local directory
cpanm --installdeps . # install all the deps for the current directory
cpanm -L extlib Plack # install Plack and all non-core deps into extlib
cpanm --mirror http://cpan.cpantesters.org/ DBI # use the fast-syncing mirror
cpanm --from https://cpan.metacpan.org/ Plack # use only the HTTPS mirror

COMMANDS
(arguments)
Command line arguments can be either a module name, distribution
file, local file path, HTTP URL or git repository URL. Following
commands will all work as you expect.

cpanm Plack
cpanm Plack/Request.pm
cpanm MIYAGAWA/Plack-1.0000.tar.gz
cpanm /path/to/Plack-1.0000.tar.gz
cpanm http://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/M/MI/MIYAGAWA/Plack-0.9990.tar.gz
cpanm git://github.com/plack/Plack.git

Additionally, you can use the notation using "~" and "@" to specify
version for a given module. "~" specifies the version requirement
in the CPAN::Meta::Spec format, while "@" pins the exact version,
and is a shortcut for "~"== VERSION"".

cpanm Plack~1.0000 # 1.0000 or later
cpanm Plack~">= 1.0000, < 2.0000" # latest of 1.xxxx
cpanm Plack@0.9990 # specific version. same as Plack~"== 0.9990"

The version query including specific version or range will be sent
to MetaCPAN to search for previous releases. The query will search
for BackPAN archives by default, unless you specify "--dev" option,
in which case, archived versions will be filtered out.

For a git repository, you can specify a branch, tag, or commit SHA
to build. The default is "master"

cpanm git://github.com/plack/Plack.git@1.0000 # tag
cpanm git://github.com/plack/Plack.git@devel # branch

-i, --install
Installs the modules. This is a default behavior and this is just a
compatibility option to make it work like cpan or cpanp.

--self-upgrade
Upgrades itself. It's just an alias for:

cpanm App::cpanminus

--info
Displays the distribution information in
"AUTHOR/Dist-Name-ver.tar.gz" format in the standard out.

--installdeps
Installs the dependencies of the target distribution but won't
build itself. Handy if you want to try the application from a
version controlled repository such as git.

cpanm --installdeps .

--look
Download and unpack the distribution and then open the directory
with your shell. Handy to poke around the source code or do manual
testing.

-h, --help
Displays the help message.

-V, --version
Displays the version number.

OPTIONS
You can specify the default options in "PERL_CPANM_OPT" environment
variable.

-f, --force
Force install modules even when testing failed.

-n, --notest
Skip the testing of modules. Use this only when you just want to
save time for installing hundreds of distributions to the same perl
and architecture you've already tested to make sure it builds fine.

Defaults to false, and you can say "--no-notest" to override when
it is set in the default options in "PERL_CPANM_OPT".

--test-only
Run the tests only, and do not install the specified module or
distributions. Handy if you want to verify the new (or even old)
releases pass its unit tests without installing the module.

Note that if you specify this option with a module or distribution
that has dependencies, these dependencies will be installed if you
don't currently have them.

-S, --sudo
Switch to the root user with "sudo" when installing modules. Use
this if you want to install modules to the system perl include
path.

Defaults to false, and you can say "--no-sudo" to override when it
is set in the default options in "PERL_CPANM_OPT".

-v, --verbose
Makes the output verbose. It also enables the interactive
configuration. (See --interactive)

-q, --quiet
Makes the output even more quiet than the default. It only shows
the successful/failed dependencies to the output.

-l, --local-lib
Sets the local::lib compatible path to install modules to. You
don't need to set this if you already configure the shell
environment variables using local::lib, but this can be used to
override that as well.

-L, --local-lib-contained
Same with "--local-lib" but with --self-contained set. All non-
core dependencies will be installed even if they're already
installed.

For instance,

cpanm -L extlib Plack

would install Plack and all of its non-core dependencies into the
directory "extlib", which can be loaded from your application with:

use local::lib '/path/to/extlib';

Note that this option does NOT reliably work with perl
installations supplied by operating system vendors that strips
standard modules from perl, such as RHEL, Fedora and CentOS, UNLESS
you also install packages supplying all the modules that have been
stripped. For these systems you will probably want to install the
"perl-core" meta-package which does just that.

--self-contained
When examining the dependencies, assume no non-core modules are
installed on the system. Handy if you want to bundle application
dependencies in one directory so you can distribute to other
machines.

--exclude-vendor
Don't include modules installed under the 'vendor' paths when
searching for core modules when the "--self-contained" flag is in
effect. This restores the behaviour from before version 1.7023

--mirror
Specifies the base URL for the CPAN mirror to use, such as
"http://cpan.cpantesters.org/" (you can omit the trailing slash).
You can specify multiple mirror URLs by repeating the command line
option.

You can use a local directory that has a CPAN mirror structure
(created by tools such as OrePAN or Pinto) by using a special URL
scheme "file://". If the given URL begins with `/` (without any
scheme), it is considered as a file scheme as well.

cpanm --mirror file:///path/to/mirror
cpanm --mirror ~/minicpan # Because shell expands ~ to /home/user

Defaults to "http://www.cpan.org/".

--mirror-only
Download the mirror's 02packages.details.txt.gz index file instead
of querying the CPAN Meta DB. This will also effectively opt out
sending your local perl versions to backend database servers such
as CPAN Meta DB and MetaCPAN.

Select this option if you are using a local mirror of CPAN, such as
minicpan when you're offline, or your own CPAN index (a.k.a
darkpan).

--from, -M
cpanm -M https://cpan.metacpan.org/
cpanm --from https://cpan.metacpan.org/

Use the given mirror URL and its index as the only source to search
and download modules from.

It works similar to "--mirror" and "--mirror-only" combined, with a
small difference: unlike "--mirror" which appends the URL to the
list of mirrors, "--from" (or "-M" for short) uses the specified
URL as its only source to download index and modules from. This
makes the option always override the default mirror, which might
have been set via global options such as the one set by
"PERL_CPANM_OPT" environment variable.

Tip: It might be useful if you name these options with your shell
aliases, like:

alias minicpanm='cpanm --from ~/minicpan'
alias darkpan='cpanm --from http://mycompany.example.com/DPAN'

--mirror-index
EXPERIMENTAL: Specifies the file path to "02packages.details.txt"
for module search index.

--cpanmetadb
EXPERIMENTAL: Specifies an alternate URI for CPAN MetaDB index
lookups.

--metacpan
Prefers MetaCPAN API over CPAN MetaDB.

--cpanfile
EXPERIMENTAL: Specified an alternate path for cpanfile to search
for, when "--installdeps" command is in use. Defaults to
"cpanfile".

--prompt
Prompts when a test fails so that you can skip, force install,
retry or look in the shell to see what's going wrong. It also
prompts when one of the dependency failed if you want to proceed
the installation.

Defaults to false, and you can say "--no-prompt" to override if
it's set in the default options in "PERL_CPANM_OPT".

--dev
EXPERIMENTAL: search for a newer developer release as well.
Defaults to false.

--reinstall
cpanm, when given a module name in the command line (i.e. "cpanm
Plack"), checks the locally installed version first and skips if it
is already installed. This option makes it skip the check, so:

cpanm --reinstall Plack

would reinstall Plack even if your locally installed version is
latest, or even newer (which would happen if you install a
developer release from version control repositories).

Defaults to false.

--interactive
Makes the configuration (such as "Makefile.PL" and "Build.PL")
interactive, so you can answer questions in the distribution that
requires custom configuration or Task:: distributions.

Defaults to false, and you can say "--no-interactive" to override
when it's set in the default options in "PERL_CPANM_OPT".

--pp, --pureperl
Prefer Pure perl build of modules by setting "PUREPERL_ONLY=1" for
MakeMaker and "--pureperl-only" for Build.PL based distributions.
Note that not all of the CPAN modules support this convention yet.

--with-recommends, --with-suggests
EXPERIMENTAL: Installs dependencies declared as "recommends" and
"suggests" respectively, per META spec. When these dependencies
fail to install, cpanm continues the installation, since they're
just recommendation/suggestion.

Enabling this could potentially make a circular dependency for a
few modules on CPAN, when "recommends" adds a module that
"recommends" back the module in return.

There's also "--without-recommend" and "--without-suggests" to
override the default decision made earlier in "PERL_CPANM_OPT".

Defaults to false for both.

--with-develop
EXPERIMENTAL: Installs develop phase dependencies in META files or
"cpanfile" when used with "--installdeps". Defaults to false.

--with-configure
EXPERIMENTAL: Installs configure phase dependencies in "cpanfile"
when used with "--installdeps". Defaults to false.

--with-feature, --without-feature, --with-all-features
EXPERIMENTAL: Specifies the feature to enable, if a module supports
optional features per META spec 2.0.

cpanm --with-feature=opt_csv Spreadsheet::Read

the features can also be interactively chosen when "--interactive"
option is enabled.

"--with-all-features" enables all the optional features, and
"--without-feature" can select a feature to disable.

--configure-timeout, --build-timeout, --test-timeout
Specify the timeout length (in seconds) to wait for the configure,
build and test process. Current default values are: 60 for
configure, 3600 for build and 1800 for test.

--configure-args, --build-args, --test-args, --install-args
EXPERIMENTAL: Pass arguments for configure/build/test/install
commands respectively, for a given module to install.

cpanm DBD::mysql --configure-args="--cflags=... --libs=..."

The argument is only enabled for the module passed as a command
line argument, not dependencies.

--scandeps
DEPRECATED: Scans the depencencies of given modules and output the
tree in a text format. (See "--format" below for more options)

Because this command doesn't actually install any distributions, it
will be useful that by typing:

cpanm --scandeps Catalyst::Runtime

you can make sure what modules will be installed.

This command takes into account which modules you already have
installed in your system. If you want to see what modules will be
installed against a vanilla perl installation, you might want to
combine it with "-L" option.

--format
DEPRECATED: Determines what format to display the scanned
dependency tree. Available options are "tree", "json", "yaml" and
"dists".

tree Displays the tree in a plain text format. This is the
default value.

json, yaml
Outputs the tree in a JSON or YAML format. JSON and YAML
modules need to be installed respectively. The output tree
is represented as a recursive tuple of:

[ distribution, dependencies ]

and the container is an array containing the root elements.
Note that there may be multiple root nodes, since you can
give multiple modules to the "--scandeps" command.

dists "dists" is a special output format, where it prints the
distribution filename in the depth first order after the
dependency resolution, like:

GAAS/MIME-Base64-3.13.tar.gz
GAAS/URI-1.58.tar.gz
PETDANCE/HTML-Tagset-3.20.tar.gz
GAAS/HTML-Parser-3.68.tar.gz
GAAS/libwww-perl-5.837.tar.gz

which means you can install these distributions in this
order without extra dependencies. When combined with "-L"
option, it will be useful to replay installations on other
machines.

--save-dists
Specifies the optional directory path to copy downloaded tarballs
in the CPAN mirror compatible directory structure i.e.
authors/id/A/AU/AUTHORS/Foo-Bar-version.tar.gz

If the distro tarball did not come from CPAN, for example from a
local file or from GitHub, then it will be saved under
vendor/Foo-Bar-version.tar.gz.

--uninst-shadows
Uninstalls the shadow files of the distribution that you're
installing. This eliminates the confusion if you're trying to
install core (dual-life) modules from CPAN against perl 5.10 or
older, or modules that used to be XS-based but switched to pure
perl at some version.

If you run cpanm as root and use "INSTALL_BASE" or equivalent to
specify custom installation path, you SHOULD disable this option so
you won't accidentally uninstall dual-life modules from the core
include path.

Defaults to true if your perl version is smaller than 5.12, and you
can disable that with "--no-uninst-shadows".

NOTE: Since version 1.3000 this flag is turned off by default for
perl newer than 5.12, since with 5.12 @INC contains site_perl
directory before the perl core library path, and uninstalling
shadows is not necessary anymore and does more harm by deleting
files from the core library path.

--uninstall, -U
Uninstalls a module from the library path. It finds a packlist for
given modules, and removes all the files included in the same
distribution.

If you enable local::lib, it only removes files from the local::lib
directory.

If you try to uninstall a module in "perl" directory (i.e. core
module), an error will be thrown.

A dialog will be prompted to confirm the files to be deleted. If
you pass "-f" option as well, the dialog will be skipped and
uninstallation will be forced.

--cascade-search
EXPERIMENTAL: Specifies whether to cascade search when you specify
multiple mirrors and a mirror doesn't have a module or has a lower
version of the module than requested. Defaults to false.

--skip-installed
Specifies whether a module given in the command line is skipped if
its latest version is already installed. Defaults to true.

NOTE: The "PERL5LIB" environment variable have to be correctly set
for this to work with modules installed using local::lib, unless
you always use the "-l" option.

--skip-satisfied
EXPERIMENTAL: Specifies whether a module (and version) given in the
command line is skipped if it's already installed.

If you run:

cpanm --skip-satisfied CGI DBI~1.2

cpanm won't install them if you already have CGI (for whatever
versions) or have DBI with version higher than 1.2. It is similar
to "--skip-installed" but while "--skip-installed" checks if the
latest version of CPAN is installed, "--skip-satisfied" checks if a
requested version (or not, which means any version) is installed.

Defaults to false.

--verify
Verify the integrity of distribution files retrieved from PAUSE
using CHECKSUMS and SIGNATURES (if found). Defaults to false.

--report-perl-version
Whether it reports the locally installed perl version to the
various web server as part of User-Agent. Defaults to true unless
CI related environment variables such as "TRAVIS", "CI" or
"AUTOMATED_TESTING" is enabled. You can disable it by using
"--no-report-perl-version".

--auto-cleanup
Specifies the number of days in which cpanm's work directories
expire. Defaults to 7, which means old work directories will be
cleaned up in one week.

You can set the value to 0 to make cpan never cleanup those
directories.

--man-pages
Generates man pages for executables (man1) and libraries (man3).

Defaults to true (man pages generated) unless
"-L|--local-lib-contained" option is supplied in which case it's
set to false. You can disable it with "--no-man-pages".

--lwp
Uses LWP module to download stuff over HTTP. Defaults to true, and
you can say "--no-lwp" to disable using LWP, when you want to
upgrade LWP from CPAN on some broken perl systems.

--wget
Uses GNU Wget (if available) to download stuff. Defaults to true,
and you can say "--no-wget" to disable using Wget (versions of Wget
older than 1.9 don't support the "--retry-connrefused" option used
by cpanm).

--curl
Uses cURL (if available) to download stuff. Defaults to true, and
you can say "--no-curl" to disable using cURL.

Normally with "--lwp", "--wget" and "--curl" options set to true
(which is the default) cpanm tries LWP, Wget, cURL and HTTP::Tiny
(in that order) and uses the first one available.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
PERL_CPANM_HOME
The directory cpanm should use to store downloads and build and
test modules. Defaults to the ".cpanm" directory in your user's
home directory.

PERL_CPANM_OPT
If set, adds a set of default options to every cpanm command. These
options come first, and so are overridden by command-line options.

cpanm

Man Pages Copyright Respective Owners. Site Copyright (C) 1994 - 2024 Hurricane Electric. All Rights Reserved.