Need good resources that guide through the process of creating Perl Modules/Packages

Question

I work as an ETL developer and I have been meaning to create a Perl module where I can put a lot of the subroutines. I would also like, if it is possible, to have the module handle all the logging & error reporting although the second one is more of a nice to have than an immediate need.

I have never created a module or package in Perl before and I was wondering if folks can point me to tutorials & other reference materials that guides me through the process of taking a whole bunch of subroutines/functions that I have in my scripts and turning that into a module/package.

Thanks, Ashish

Answer 1

For example:

package MyModule;

use warnings;
use strict;

use Exporter 'import';

sub func_a { ... }

sub func_b { ... }

# ...

# Don't forget to return a true value so use will succeed!
1;

Now other modules can say

use MyModule;

print func_a(), func_b(), "\n";

Answer 2

Here are some free online resources to create Perl modules:

• perlnewmod
• perlmod
• Simple Module Tutorial

They also have links to other resources.

Answer 3

Browse the source code of modules on your system or on CPAN for good ideas and module design and implementation that you can steal borrow.

If you use cpan or perl -MCPAN ... to install modules on your own system, spend some time browsing your own <cpanhome>/build directory to get the gist of how the modules are built, tested, and installed on your system.

Answer 4

Most of what I know about modules, I learned from O'Reilly's The Perl Cookbook, in particular, there is good coverage of h2xs, an executable which ships with Perl which builds a scaffold module, including test directories and Makefile.pl, a makefile generator.