NAME

App::stew - stew your dependencies!

SYNOPSIS

# Create the repository
$ tree ../repo-stew
dist/
    linux-debian-8/
        x86_64/
    linux-centos-7/
    linux-suse-11/
stew/
src/

# Create stewfile with dependencies
$ cat stewfile
perl
libgd
libgd-perl

# Bootstrap dependencies (build from source, or install from binaries)
$ stew install --repo repo-stew .

# Run your perl with your libraries in your own environment
$ stew exec perl -V

DESCRIPTION

stew is an in-app package manager.

stew allows you to package not only CPAN dependencies, but actually your perl and/or any other system libraries. All the dependencies are installed into your project directory local/ by default. Shipping it to a deployment server is a no brainer.

stew infrustucture consists of stew repository with stewfiles, sources and binary packages and app's local installation of stew packages.

stew repository is just a simple directory structure (can be served as a static directory through a web server) with stew/, src/ and dist/ directories.

• stew/ has stewfiles (like perl_5.22.stew)
• src/ original dependency sources (like perl-5.22.tar.gz)
• dist/ binary packages (like perl_linux-debian-9_x86_64_5.22.tar.gz)

stewfiles are files with instructions on how to build the package (like ports in FreeBSD, Gentoo ebuild, ArchLinux PKGBUILDs etc), they look like this:

---
name: perl
version: 5.22.1
package: ${name}-${version}
sources:
    - ${package}.tar.gz
depends:
    - patch
    - less
prepare:
    - tar xzf '${package}.tar.gz'
    - cd ${package}
build:
    - cd '${package}'
    - >
        ./Configure
        -Duselargefiles
        -Duse64bitint
        -Dprefix=${PREFIX}
        -Dman1dir=none
        -Dman3dir=none
        -Uuseshrplib -Duserelocatableinc
        -Dvendorprefix=.../..
        -Accflags=-DPERLIO_BUFSIZ=32768
        -Uafs
        -Ud_csh
        -Ud_ualarm
        -Uusesfio
        -Uusenm
        -Ui_libutil
        -des
    - make
install:
    - cd '${package}'
    - make install

stew exec then sets the correct PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and other needed environment variables and runs the command.

Building from source & Installing from binaries

The first time you compile all your dependencies from sources, the binaries packages are stored in build/.cache/dist path and can be uploaded to the existing stew repository for later use. The next time the bootstrap is going to be done from the binaries packages and won't take a lot of time.

Commands

install install package uninstall uninstall package build build package without installing autoremove remove not required dependencies list-installed list installed packages exec execute command in local environment help detailed command help

Version control

All the dependencies are versioned. It is possible for different versions to coexist in the same repository and only install the ones needed.

Stacks

Sometimes (actually very often) you want to have several repositories for different versions of your app. Since there is nothing special in stew repositories one can just create different subfolders for different subrepositories:

stew-repo/
    stacks/
        1.0/
            stew/
            src/
            dist/
        1.2/
            stew/
            src/
            dist/

And then just pass correct repository path when installing dependencies:

stew install --repo stew-repo/stacks/1.0 .

CPAN distributions

Since building your own CPAN stewfiles with all the dependencies from scratch can be daunting there is a special script cpan2stew that does that for you:

# Generate stewfiles saving sources to stew repository
cpan2stew --local Plack

# Generate stewfiles from the local CPAN mirror
cpan2stew --cpan http://darkpan Plack

# Generate stewfiles extracting dependencies from cpanfile
cpan2stew --cpanfile cpanfile

Relocatability

If you want to be able to move your application around, the dependencies have to be built as relocatable. Most of the libraries don't create any problems, but some of them hardcode the paths during the compilation.

The perl's stewfile example from above is built as relocatable, so you can move your perl application without a problem.

AUTHOR

Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi, vti@cpan.org.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2015-2017, Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi.

This program is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl 5.10.