Getting Ego

The latest version of Ego will probably be available on the CPAN. [This is not yet the case; ignore any reference to it.]

Catalyst and Template Toolkit are the two big Perl prerequisites for Ego. They involve installing many modules.

The easiest way by far to install Perl modules is with the CPAN shell (or CPANPLUS).

Developers

There is a read only subversion repository at http://dev.perlperl.com/.

Getting your local environment together

If you are not able to root use on your server, you'll need to set up your environment to allow you to install Perl modules locally. If you have root access, you probably don't need much help with the installation and can skip to the installation.

First, if you never have, run the shell and set your configuration by following the prompts.

perl -MCPAN -e shell

Once that's done, you'll have a configuration file written for you. Open it to edit.

~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm

Update the two lines for make_install_arg and makepl_arg.

'make_install_arg' => qq[SITEPREFIX=$ENV{HOME}/local],
'makepl_arg' => qq[INSTALLDIRS=site install_base=$ENV{HOME}/local],

You might also want to set the prerequisites_policy to follow if it's not already. A more sane default is ask because then you won't install things you don't know about but if you're installing Catalyst or Template from scratch, you will be intalling up to a couple hundred modules which they need to run. Being asked about each one can be extremely tedious. If prerequisites_policy is follow, then you won't be prompted to approve them all.

'prerequisites_policy' => q[follow],

Now you need to modify your environment so that the CPAN shell can see your locally installed modules. These should do the trick. Choose the one that matches your shell environment. If you use another shell, you might have to edit them.

.tcshrc addition

setenv PATH $HOME/local/bin\:$HOME/local/script\:$PATH
set perlversion=`perl -v | grep 'built for' | awk '{print $4}' | sed -e  's/v//;'`
setenv PERL5LIB $HOME/local/share/perl/$perlversion\:$HOME/local/lib/perl/$perlversion\:$HOME/local/lib

.bashrc addition

export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$HOME/local/script:$PATH
perlversion=`perl -v | grep 'built for' | awk '{print $4}' | sed -e 's/v//;'`
export PERL5LIB=$HOME/local/share/perl/$perlversion:$HOME/local/lib/perl/$perlversion:$HOME/local/lib:$PERL5LIB

Source the updated file when done.

source ~/.tcshrc
# OR
source ~/.bashrc

You can probably run the command env (or env|sort) to see if your changes propagated correctly to your environment.

You should be ready to install everything.

Installing from the CPAN

Ego is not yet on the CPAN. When the XHTML checking is rewritten and the test suite is expanded and covers more, it will be uploaded. But you do not need the CPAN to use Ego. You don't even need to install it (more on this later).

Start the CPAN shell again. And try to install Ego.

perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install Ego

Ego lists Catalyst and Template Toolkit among its prerequisites, so if you've never installed Catalyst or Template they will be included. If you didn't set your prerequisites_policy (see above) you will need to approve many modules. A fresh install can take a long time so go get a snack or something.

Barring unusual or broken dependency chains, everything your Ego installation needs to run should be installed automatically from that single CPAN shell command.