Pointing CPAN To Your Local Mirror

 I have been out of the Perl development arena for quite a while (about 10 years or so, to be brutally honest).  That's what happens when your career takes you in a different direction.  

Recently I re-found my wanting to code in Perl after reading some postings by a friend, which made me realize that I was kind of missing it.  

Anywho, that brings me to the reason for this article.  I am re-learning some things, and one of those things is the setting up of your own, local CPAN repository.   There are times when one may not have an internet connection, but wants to work, none-the-less.  This is where having a mirror of CPAN on your local machine is a good thing.  

I am not going to go into how to create the mirror, because there is quite the plethora of documentation and write-ups on that topic, but instead, I am going to write a quick bit on actually pointing to your local mirror. 

Now, it matters not where you have it, but for the sake of this article, let's say that you have the mirror located at /tmp/cpan_mirror  (yes, I am assuming that you are on Linux.  If you are on Windows, I hate to say it but you are on your own as I don't touch the thing).

The first thing you need to do is drop into the cpan cli.  You can do this simply by typing cpan at your command line and hitting enter.  You'll be dropped to the cpan prompt:

 cpan[?]>

Once there, you'll need to do the following things.  I will create a list of tasks first, and then put the commands after. 

• check the urllist and see what other mirrors are listed
• remove all other mirrors (saving the url's aside if you wish to reset them later)
• add your local repo path
• commit your changes
• reload cpan

Ok, so here are the commands:

$ cpan       (to drop into the cpan prompt)
cpan[?]> o conf urllist
cpan[?]> o conf urllist pop   <--- run this till any urls are out of the list
cpan[?]> o conf urllist "file:///tmp/cpan_mirror/"
cpan[?]> o conf commit
cpan[?]> reload cpan

After that, you should be able to, at the cpan prompt or using the cli, install modules.  You can test its pointing to your local repo by turning off your wifi and ensuring you cannot get to the internet.

To reset it back to internet based mirrors, just follow the same procedure, adding the mirror you like to use in place of your local path, and without the double quotes.

Enjoy!  And TMTOWTDI!!