Bash – Silent and scripted install of CPAN and Perl modules

I've spent near 4 days fighting with this issue and here's the setup that finally got me there:

• don't use macports
• use the stock perl, with a twist:
  • Snow Leopard ships with 2 perls: 5.10.0 and 5.8.9 - switch to the earlier version like so:

% export VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT=yes

% defaults write com.apple.versioner.perl Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes

% defaults write com.apple.versioner.perl Version 5.8.9

• download the 32bit version of mysql from dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/ ("Mac OS X ver. 10.6 (x86, 32-bit)")
  • Find the instructions on Google - I just put the extracted directory in /usr/local and linked /usr/local/mysql to that directory
• CPAN seems to prefer the 5.10.0-specific install locations, so I downloaded DBD::mysql from search.cpan.org and did the usual install:

% perl Makefile.PL

% make

% sudo make install

UPDATE:

• In order to get CPAN to get its config from the right perl version, and to get Apache to run perl CGIs with the right perl version, use the following command instead of the last one in the above list:

% defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.versioner.perl Version 5.8.9

You'll have to be an admin to do this. After this, HUP apache and you'll be all set.

That's a pretty old version of Perl (released Jan 2006). I did manage to get to work for similar versions of each component but it never passed the build tests. Besides your LD_LIBRARY_PATH (some systems use a 64-bit version) and ORACLE_HOME, I had to be careful with default character set and locale to get this to work. Be careful too of having multiple homes. In the end, I installed Oracle's Instant Client separately and defined the real instance through tnsnames.

Redoing this later with newer software was much easier on a very similar system. So, upgrade if possible or use an Instant Client for a simpler environment.