Comments on: Install Perl Modules without root

By: Naveen

Naveen — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:45:00 +0000

First, my sincere apologies for not being able to reply to your message for so long. In most likelihood, you have not given full absolute path of the perl library you’re trying to include, hence it’s having problems in cron. If you still have this problem open, you can post the exact statements which you use, and I can have a look at it.

By: Ned

Ned — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:20:57 +0000

Does this work in crons?
I used your approach, however, my script doesn’t run in the cron - for manual run, it does work fine.

Thanks,
Ned

By: Naveen

Naveen — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:30:21 +0000

very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce

Don’t agree with what exactly? If you can explain Idetrorce.

By: Naveen

Naveen — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:40:32 +0000

There is another way to do this:
use lib ‘./lib’;
Using the lib module takes away the need for a BEGIN block and is considered a better practice. You can add multiple directories to @INC by providing lib a list as well:
use lib qw(./lib ./project_lib);
You may want to consider fully qualified paths as well.
The PERL5LIB environment variable is handy as well to avoid the problem as well. People should know though that if you are running this on a server PERL5LIB won’t work if you are running Perl as CGI under suexec (common on shared web hosts). Although I haven’t tried it, if you have the ability to edit your .htaccess files (apache config overrides file) you could probably do a:
SetEnv PERL5LIB ./lib;./project_lib;
To set that up in the server’s environment which executes the script. Not sure if that’ll work though.
It’s also worth noting that if you have shell access on a shared webhost you can install your own CPAN modules above and beyond what the server has by creating your own Perl modules directory. Dreamhost has a nifty article on their wiki on how to do this. It works pretty well though you may wish to avoid messing with the DBI (often they’re older and newer versions may not compile). You can see their article on the matter at:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/CPAN
I’m sure the directions can be pretty easily adapted to other hosts.

Hi Dave,
Thanks for the lovely insight and detailed explanations above. Yes I know about the use lib approach but was no quite sure which one is better. Thanks again for the same.

By: Dave Doyle

Dave Doyle — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:07:24 +0000

There is another way to do this:

use lib ‘./lib’;

Using the lib module takes away the need for a BEGIN block and is considered a better practice. You can add multiple directories to @INC by providing lib a list as well:

use lib qw(./lib ./project_lib);

You may want to consider fully qualified paths as well.

The PERL5LIB environment variable is handy as well to avoid the problem as well. People should know though that if you are running this on a server PERL5LIB won’t work if you are running Perl as CGI under suexec (common on shared web hosts). Although I haven’t tried it, if you have the ability to edit your .htaccess files (apache config overrides file) you could probably do a:

SetEnv PERL5LIB ./lib;./project_lib;

To set that up in the server’s environment which executes the script. Not sure if that’ll work though.

It’s also worth noting that if you have shell access on a shared webhost you can install your own CPAN modules above and beyond what the server has by creating your own Perl modules directory. Dreamhost has a nifty article on their wiki on how to do this. It works pretty well though you may wish to avoid messing with the DBI (often they’re older and newer versions may not compile). You can see their article on the matter at:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/CPAN

I’m sure the directions can be pretty easily adapted to other hosts.