sharing a perlbrew installation among multiple users

Question

I want to setup a single Perlbrew installation to share among my team, so they don't all have to compile versions of Perl separately. So I set PERLBREW_ROOT and then installed Perlbrew on a network drive. Then I started sourcing the bashrc from my .profile-user file.

So far so good, but I'm not sure what to tell them to do. The documentation says every user needs to run "perlbrew init" first, but I never did that myself. Everything I did is in the first paragraph.

At any rate, what steps should I tell them to run?

Answer 1

First of all, pass -Duserelocatableinc to perlbrew when installing a build of Perl to avoid problems that will arrise from differences in the paths used to access the installed perl.

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If the other users simply want to use one of the perlbrew-installed builds of Perl, they simply need to point the shebang line of their script to the perl inside the perlbrew directory as usual.

For example, if PERLBREW_ROOT is /home/ikegami/usr/perlbrew and the perlbrew label for the install is feed_fetcher, one would use

#!/home/ikegami/usr/perlbrew/perls/feed_fetcher/bin/perl

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If the other users also want to install modules and/or use scripts installed by modules (e.g. Module::CoreList's corelist, Unicode::Tussle's uniprops, etc), they must also do the following:

1. In their login script, add

   export PERLBREW_ROOT=/.../perl5/perlbrew
   

2. In their shell startup script, add

   source "${PERLBREW_ROOT:-$HOME/perl5/perlbrew}"/etc/bashrc
   

You can technically skip the first step, but only if the path hardcoded in etc/bashrc is correct for that user.