efa - Commandline Public Transit Routing Interface

efa is a commandline client and Perl module for EFA public transit routing interfaces such as efa.vrr.de. See the Travel::Routing::DE::VRR homepage for details.

Installation

efa has been packaged as libtravel-routing-de-vrr-perl for Debian, so you can install it using your package manager of choice on Debian-based Linux distributions. It is also available as perl-travel-routing-de-vrr-git in the archlinux User Repository (AUR). Both provide the commandline client and the Perl module.

If you are using another distribution or would prefer a more recent version, you have four installation options:

• Nightly .deb builds for Debian-based distributions
• Installing the latest release from CPAN
• Installation from source
• Using a Docker image

Except for Docker, efa is available in your PATH after installation. You can run efa --version to verify this. Documentation is available via man efa.

Nightly Builds for Debian

lib.finalrewind.org/deb provides Debian packages of both development and release versions. Note that these are not part of the official Debian repository and are not covered by its quality assurance process.

To install the latest release, run:

wget https://lib.finalrewind.org/deb/libtravel-routing-de-vrr-perl_latest_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i libtravel-routing-de-vrr-perl_latest_all.deb
sudo apt --fix-broken install
rm libtravel-routing-de-vrr-perl_latest_all.deb

For a (possibly broken) development snapshot of the Git master branch, run:

wget https://lib.finalrewind.org/deb/libtravel-routing-de-vrr-perl_dev_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i libtravel-routing-de-vrr-perl_dev_all.deb
sudo apt --fix-broken install
rm libtravel-routing-de-vrr-perl_dev_all.deb

Note that dpkg, unlike apt, does not automatically install missing dependencies. If a dependency is not satisfied yet, dpkg -i will complain about unmet dependencies and bail out. apt --fix-broken install installs these dependencies and also silently finishes the Travel::Routing::DE::VRR installation.

Uninstallation works as usual:

sudo apt remove libtravel-routing-de-vrr-perl

Installation from CPAN

Travel::Routing::DE::VRR releases are published on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) and can be installed using standard Perl module tools such as cpanminus.

Before proceeding, ensure that you have standard build tools (i.e. make, pkg-config and a C compiler) installed. You will also need the following libraries with development headers:

• libssl
• libxml2
• zlib

Now, use a tool of your choice to install the module. Minimum working example:

cpanm Travel::Routing::DE::VRR

If you run this as root, it will install script and module to /usr/local by default.

Installation from Source

In this variant, you must ensure availability of dependencies by yourself. You may use carton or cpanminus with the provided cpanfile, Module::Build's installdeps command, or rely on the Perl modules packaged by your distribution. On Debian 10+, all dependencies are available from the package repository.

To check whether dependencies are satisfied, run:

perl Build.PL

If it complains about "... is not installed" or "ERRORS/WARNINGS FOUND IN PREREQUISITES", it is missing dependencies.

Once all dependencies are satisfied, use Module::Build to build, test and install the module. Testing is optional -- you may skip the "Build test" step if you like.

If you downloaded a release tarball, proceed as follows:

./Build
./Build test
sudo ./Build install

If you are using the Git repository, use the following commands:

./Build
./Build manifest
./Build test
sudo ./Build install

If you do not have superuser rights or do not want to perform a system-wide installation, you may leave out Build install and use efa from the current working directory.

With carton:

carton exec efa --version

Otherwise (also works with carton):

perl -Ilocal/lib/perl5 -Ilib bin/efa --version

Running efa via Docker

An efa image is available on Docker Hub. It is intended for testing purposes: due to the latencies involved in spawning a container for each efa invocation, it is less convenient for day-to-day usage.

Installation:

docker pull derfnull/efa:latest

Use it by prefixing efa commands with docker run --rm derfnull/efa:latest, like so:

docker run --rm derfnull/efa:latest --version

Documentation is not available in this image. Please refer to the online efa manual instead.