• Getting Started
  • Installing Manually
  • Local Configuration Changes
  • Compatibility Notes

Getting Started

We strongly recommend using metacpan-docker. This will give you a virtual machine already configured and ready to start developing on.

Installing Manually

If you prefer not to use Docker, the following commands will get you started:

$ carton install
$ yarn install
$ export PATH="$(realpath ./node_modules/.bin):$PATH"
$ ./bin/prove t
$ carton exec plackup -p 5001 -r

To run the tests in parallel, add -j8 (or however many CPUs you have) to the prove command.

Local Git and testing considerations

You will want to set up the supplied pre-commit Git hook like so:

$ ./git/setup.sh

which causes tidyall to be run before each commit. You can manually run this with tidyall path/to/file

Local Configuration Changes

The back end defaults to fastapi.metacpan.org. Running a local API server is optional and not required to hack on the front end. The address to the API being used can be changed in the metacpan_web.conf file. Ideally you would create a new file called metacpan_web_local.conf that contains

api                 http://127.0.0.1:5000

which will be loaded on top of the existing config file.

Compatibility Notes

On Win32 (and possibly also on other platforms) when using Perl < 5.12, the server started with plackup will generate warnings relating to date parsing. These are caused by Plack due to a bug in the gmtime implementation and can be removed by upgrading to Perl 5.12.