There are two build systems for building a module. One is to use the old and stable “ExtUtils::Makemaker”, and new one is using “Module::Build”. We will use the Module::Starter module to help us create a module.

By default, Module::Starter create a distribution with Makefile.PL

First with Makefile.PL

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

module-starter --module="Animal" --author="Steven Sun" --email=steven.sun2013@gmail.com --verbose

This is the same as:
module-starter --builder="ExtUtils::Makemaker" --module="Animal" --author="Steven Sun" --email=steven.sun2013@gmail.com --verbose

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make disttest
make dist

Next we will show you the “Build.PL”

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

module-starter --builder="Module::Build" --module="Animal" --author="Steven Sun" --email=steven.sun2013@gmail.com --verbose

or in a simpler way, we can do this:
module-starter --mb --module="Animal" --author="Steven Sun" --email=steven.sun2013@gmail.com --verbose

perl Build.PL
./Build
./Build test
./Build disttest       ##this will create a .tar.gz archive which we can distribute now.  
./Build dist

For the Module::Build way, there is a shortcut.

We don’t want to type that long command line every time, so module-starter can get that information from a
configuration file $HOME/.module-starter/config. If we’re on Windows, that .module-starter name is a bit of a
problem, so we can set the MODULE_STARTER_DIR environment variable to the name of the directory that contains config. Inside config, we can list the parameter names and values separated by a colon.

1
2
3
4

author: Steven Sun
email: steven.sun2013@gmail.com
builder: Module::Build
verbose: 1

Once we have our configuration file setup, life is much easier since we only need to specify the name of the distribution that we want to create.

1

% module−starter −−module=Animal