Installation of mod_perl-enabled Apache Without Superuser Privileges

As you have seen from my previous articles, mod_perl-enabled Apache consists of two main components: Perl modules and Apache itself. While installing Apache without root privileges is a very easy task, one should know how to install Perl modules in a non-systemwide location. In this article I'll show different ways to tackle this task.

While installing Apache without root privileges is a very easy task, one should know how to install Perl modules in a non-systemwide location. In this tutorial, Stas Bekman describes how to do just that.

In the examples used in this article I'll use stas as a username and /home/stas as a home directory of that user.

Installing Perl Modules into a Directory of Choice

Since without superuser permissions you aren't allowed to install modules into system directories like /usr/lib/perl5, you need to find out how to install the modules under your home directory. It's easy.

First you have to decide where to install the modules. The simplest approach is to simulate the portion of the / file system relevant to Perl under your home directory. Actually we need only two directories:

  /home/stas/bin
  /home/stas/lib

We don't have to create them, since that will be done automatically when the first module is installed. 99 percent of the files will go into the lib directory. Occasionally, when some module distribution comes with Perl scripts, these will go into the bin directory. This directory will be created if it doesn't exist.

Let's install the CGI.pm package, which includes a few other CGI::* modules. As usual, download the package from the CPAN repository, unpack it and chdir to the newly-created directory.

Now do a standard perl Makefile.PL to prepare a Makefile, but this time tell MakeMaker to use your Perl installation directories instead of the defaults:

  % perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/stas

PREFIX=/home/stas is the only part of the installation process which is different from usual. Note that if you don't like how MakeMaker chooses the rest of the directories, or if you are using an older version of it which requires an explicit declaration of all the target directories, you should do this:

  % perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/stas     INSTALLPRIVLIB=/home/stas/lib/perl5     INSTALLSCRIPT=/home/stas/bin     INSTALLSITELIB=/home/stas/lib/perl5/site_perl     INSTALLBIN=/home/stas/bin     INSTALLMAN1DIR=/home/stas/lib/perl5/man      INSTALLMAN3DIR=/home/stas/lib/perl5/man3




 The rest is as usual: 
  % make
  % make test
  % make install




 make install installs all the files in the private repository.
Note that all the missing directories are created automatically, so there is no
need to create them in first place. Here (slightly edited) is what it does : 

  Installing /home/stas/lib/perl5/CGI/Cookie.pm
  Installing /home/stas/lib/perl5/CGI.pm
  Installing /home/stas/lib/perl5/man3/CGI.3
  Installing /home/stas/lib/perl5/man3/CGI::Cookie.3
  Writing /home/stas/lib/perl5/auto/CGI/.packlist
  Appending installation info to /home/stas/lib/perl5/perllocal.pod




 If you have to use the explicit target parameters, instead of a single
PREFIX parameter, you will find it useful to create a file called
(for example) ~/.perl_dirs (where ~ is
/home/stas in our example) containing: 
    PREFIX=/home/stas     INSTALLPRIVLIB=/home/stas/lib/perl5     INSTALLSCRIPT=/home/stas/bin     INSTALLSITELIB=/home/stas/lib/perl5/site_perl     INSTALLBIN=/home/stas/bin     INSTALLMAN1DIR=/home/stas/lib/perl5/man      INSTALLMAN3DIR=/home/stas/lib/perl5/man3