• Getting Started
  • Installing Manually
    • Building Static Assets
    • Installing on macOS
  • Running Tests
  • Running the App
  • Local Git and testing considerations
  • Local Configuration Changes
  • Compatibility Notes

We strongly recommend using metacpan-docker. This will give you a virtual machine already configured and ready to start developing on.

If you prefer not to use Docker, the following commands will get you started:

carton install
npm install
export PATH="$(realpath ./node_modules/.bin):$PATH"

npm run build

Without running this command you may get errors about a missing "asset map".

If you like, you can install carton and cmark via Homebrew:

brew install carton cmark

On an ARM Mac you may need to install CommonMark in the following way:

LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/homebrew/lib CPATH=/opt/homebrew/include cpm install -g CommonMark

If your carton install is having issues with SSL-related modules, you may need to use an OPENSSL_PREFIX. Something like:

OPENSSL_PREFIX="/usr/local/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1q" carton install

You may need to check /usr/local/Cellar/openssl@1.1 to find the latest installed path on your system.

You can use the supplied wrapper around prove to run tests:

./bin/prove t

To run the tests in parallel, add -j8 (or however many CPUs you have) to the prove command.

carton exec plackup -p 5001 -r

If you'd like to use Gazelle rather than the default Plack server:

carton exec plackup -p 5001 -s Gazelle -r

You will want to set up the supplied pre-commit Git hook like so:

./git/setup.sh

which causes precious to be run before each commit. You can manually run this with precious path/to/file

The back end defaults to api.metacpan.org/v1. Running a local API server is optional and not required to hack on the front end. The address to the API being used can be changed in the metacpan_web.yaml file. Ideally you would create a new file called metacpan_web_local.yaml that contains

api: http://127.0.0.1:5000

which will be loaded on top of the existing config file.

On Win32 (and possibly also on other platforms) when using Perl < 5.12, the server started with plackup will generate warnings relating to date parsing. These are caused by Plack due to a bug in the gmtime implementation and can be removed by upgrading to Perl 5.12.