Ubuntu Manpage: cpanm - get, unpack build and install modules from CPAN

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 CPAN using CHECKSUMS file, and SIGNATURES
file (if found in the distribution). Defaults to false.

Using this option does not verify the integrity of the CHECKSUMS file, and it's unsafe to rely on
this option if you're using a CPAN mirror that you do not trust.

--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.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2010- Tatsuhiko Miyagawa.

AUTHOR

       Tatsuhiko Miyagawa

perl v5.36.0                                       2023-08-14                                          CPANM(1p)