ThisPAN

ThisPAN is a lightweight CPAN mirror browser.

See it in action here!

Features

• Reverse dependencies (if they are specified in META.yml or META.json)
• Interactive dependency (and reverse dependency) graph ala Stratopan, with d3.js (again only for prereqs in the metadata files)
• Pretty POD render with syntax highlighting thanks to highlight.js
• Index and browse multiple mirrors
• PSGI-compliant
• Reasonably lightweight: Dancer + DBIC
• Free and open source software

Not features

• Indexing of past releases. ThisPAN is intended to provide an up to date view of what's in your repository right now. Internal mirrors for darkpans don't usually keep old releases.
• PAUSE-like uploading. ThisPAN does not manage uploading at all. Use your existing tools, e.g. Pinto or mcpani.
• Any understanding of what's a version number good for, including whether a given distribution satisfies a dependency declared on a version range. If your mirror is broken in this regard, so is ThisPAN.
• Authentication. If your ThisPAN instance is indexing public distributions, keep it public. If it's indexing private distributions, keep it as private as your mirror. If you really need authentication, there are several authentication middlewares for Plack.

Installation

You need a CPAN mirror somewhere, accessible either via HTTP like a regular repository or reachable locally. This is not managed via ThisPAN; you should use an existing tool like Pinto or minicpan to build it.

(While re-indexing www.cpan.org is possible, please don't do it.)

This mirror ought to have a directory structure a bit like this:

authors
  id
    W
      WE
        WEBORAMA
          CHECKSUMS
          ThisPAN-0.001.tar.gz
    etc.
modules
  02packages.details.txt.gz

ThisPAN can be run entirely straight from a cloned repository, assuming you install the dependencies first:

cd path/to/git-clone
cpanm -v --installdeps .

ThisPAN will need a database to properly index distribution metadata. The official, supported flavor is SQLite 3, but anything sufficiently DBIC-friendly should work.

cpanm -v DBD::SQLite DateTime::Format::SQLite

Create the database (the ThisPAN tarball provides a DDL file, again for SQLite).

sqlite3 foo.db < sql/create.sql

Start indexing:

perl -Ilib bin/thispan-indexer \
     --mirror file:///home/fgabolde/work/localpinto/ \
     --workdir /home/fgabolde/work/local-dist-data/ \
     --tempdir /home/fgabolde/work/my-workspace/
     --state state.storable \
     --dsn dbi:SQLite:foo.db

This script should be started regularly, or possibly whenever a new tarball enters your mirror.

Web frontend deployment

To deploy the web frontend, we recommend installing your pick of a PSGI-aware server, e.g. Starman, and the Plack tools and libraries (cpanm -v Plack Starman).

You can find an example PSGI app at examples/start-thispan-web.psgi. Edit it (there are quite a few paths that you should modify in there) and save it wherever.

Create a configuration file named config.yml (Dancer needs that exact filename) in the confdir you specified in your PSGI script, using the example at examples/config.yml. Documentation for this file lives at ThisPAN::Configuration (caution: this module may or may not have been written yet).

plackup -s Starman -p 5000 some/path/start-thispan-web.psgi \
        --pid thispan.pid -D

You should have a working app at http://localhost:5000/wherever.