CODEWITHSUNDEEP
perlcpancpanm
PKHunter
PKHunter

Reputation: 706

Installing cpan or cpanm modules on a behind-firewall machine with no Internet connection

I've already read related threads like these, but they do not fully capture our situation.

  1. This is on a firewalled machine. No net access. We can ftp files to folders and install modules from there.
  2. We have CHMOD 777 for our users on some folders. We can install Perl modules if we locally build them by downloading the relevant .pm files. But when these files cannot install, we do not have any cpan or cpanm.

I'd like to install, for example, HTML::Restrict. If I do the download + install thing, the Restrict.pm gives me this error: 

/lib/HTML/Restrict.PM:328: Unknown command paragraph "=encoding UTF-8"

Reading a bit online suggests that this could be an old Perl problem. We use 5.8.x. Our own dev machines have the luxury of 5.16.x and internet access so installing module is a cinch. Anyway, one of my older machines also has 5.8.x, and installing the module via cpanminus worked there (with internet).

So, question: is it possible to install "cpanminus" (cpanm) through FTP, then upload specific module files to the server through FTP too, and then go into shell and install modules via cpanm by pointing it to respective .pm files?

Thank you for any pointers.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1631

Answers (2)

Borodin
Borodin

Reputation: 126742

I still don't really understand your thinking, but you can get a stand-alone version of cpanm using curl. For instance

curl -sS --location https://cpanmin.us/ --output cpanm

then you should be able to just copy it to your target machine, put it on your PATH, and do

cpanm HTML-Restrict-2.2.2.tar.gz

but I doubt if you will find any change to the specific errors you are getting

Upvotes: 1

Borodin
Borodin

Reputation: 126742

You should take a look at perldoc perlmodinstall which goes into detail about how to install a module from its distribution. It follows what should be a familiar incantation

  • Decompress
  • Unpack
  • Build
  • Test
  • Install

Assuming you're on a Linux system, this commonly takes take the form of

  • gzip -d My-Module-Distribution.tar.gz
  • tar -xof My-Module-Distribution.tar
  • perl Makefile.PL
  • make
  • make test
  • make install

But after the Unpack stage you will often find a README file or other text file that will describe any unusual steps to be taken

Clearly some of these steps can be combined. For instance, most people will probably want to use

tar -xvfz My-Module-Distribution.tar.gz

to avoid having to invoke gzip separately. Likewise, the make system will force a build phase as a prerequisite if you use just

make test

without the preceding make

The linked document has a lot to say about how to install on other platforms, should you not be running a Linux variant

Upvotes: 2

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