Perl

Continuous Deployment to CPAN

Recently I was working on a refactor of one of my CPAN modules which, among other things, involved changing its name from Test::A8N to the specific Test::Story.  Doing so made me think about the process I usually go through when I consider releasing a CPAN module.

First, let me explain something about myself: I don’t like tedious or repetitive tasks.  I hate having to do the same thing over and over again, partly because I don’t want to waste my time, but mostly because inevitably one of the following will happen:

  1. I’ll forget a crucial step, and will screw something up;
  2. I’ll forget how to do it, and in my efforts to re-learn it I’ll screw something up;
  3. I won’t care enough to go through the effort, so something will get screwed up.

I expect you’re noticing a trend here.  Really the only reason programmers come into this profession in the first place I suspect is because we’re just so bad at doing things the normal way, we have to automate everything we’ll either do poorly, lazily, or forget to do all together.

For those of us who are programmers, many times we’re so lazy that we won’t want to do the same thing within our programs more than once, so we abstract functionality into reusable modules.  By that token the Perl community must be some of the most inventively lazy group of people, because CPAN is full of useful tidbits like that.  Getting modules to CPAN requires a contributor to actually, you know, submit their project.  And this is, in itself, a somewhat manual process.

I do all of my development in a version control repository, and I write a decent amount of unit tests to prove my functionality works.  So once I come to the decision that a set of new features is worthy of a new release, this is the process I go through:

  1. Run “perl Makefile.PL && make && make test” to verify everything runs okay;
  2. Run “make dist” to create the distribution tarball;
  3. Noticing the version number is wrong, I go in and change it in the main Perl module;
  4. After running “make dist” again, I realize I forgot to change the README;
  5. Potentially after another “make dist“, I’ll remember I’m supposed to update the Changes file to indicate what I’ve added;
  6. It’s at this point I realize that I forgot to add new documentation to cover this new feature;
  7. I run “make test” again, this time with TEST_POD=1 set to ensure my documentation checks are run;
  8. I’ll then try to remember what the command is for uploading a new CPAN module, which involves searching on CPAN for something related to “Upload”;
  9. Finding “cpan-upload“, I’ll have to look at its documentation to figure out how to use it;
  10. I run “cpan-upload“, only to realize I forgot to set my PAUSE credentials in ~/.pause.

At this point, if I’m lucky, the upload will succeed.  This process isn’t meant to be a negative reflection on CPAN, but rather on my own forgetfulness and need to automate.

Read on to find out how I managed to automate this part of my life as well.

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