We are getting ready to deploy a Tcl application, but i'm having trouble figuring out how to do it. Currently, I'm experimenting with tclkit and sdx.kit. I can pack a single tcl file and run it, but the structure of the whole application contains folders and images and c files that work together with tcl. i have two folders and inside a bunch of c files and tcl files and other stuff. How would i go and wrap the whole thing. What tool do you guys recommend other than tclkit and why?
The main way that you're recommended to distribute applications is as a tclkit. There are a few alternatives (e.g., TOBE, ActiveState's commercial tooling) but they're pretty similar as they all build on top of Tcl's virtual filesystem layer. (NB. This isn't the same as the Linux VFS stuff; this is a VFS in a single application.) Indeed, the ActiveState tooling actually is a rebadged tclkit (plus some other stuff like code obfuscation). I believe that TOBE uses ZIP archives instead of metakit databases.
The advantage of using a VFS-based solution is that it means that lots of things work inside, particularly including both source (for getting another .tcl file in) and load (for getting a binary library). In fact, you can put your application, the packages it depends on, and the resources (images, etc.) inside the VFS and be fairly sure that things will work. About the only things that we know run into real problems are where you want to exec something in the archive (the VFS mount is process-local; you have to copy the subsidiary file out if you want it to be seen in subprocesses) and if you're wanting to load certificates of private keys with the tls package (because the underlying OpenSSL library doesn't delegate to Tcl to handle that part of its I/O for some reason, AIUI).
When you're building these things, effectively you make a directory (and its subdirectories) that have everything laid out right. Then you run the packager (sdx for tclkits) and it builds the overall application for you. Attach the result to a runtime (the standard tclkit) and you're ready to test and deploy.
We don't generally do tool recommendations here on Stack Overflow, but the ActiveState Tcl Dev Kit is actually rather widely used. Many other people use sdx/tclkit. TOBE is quite a lot rarer. (There are other packaging techniques, but I wouldn't recommend them these days; a packaged VFS works very well indeed.)
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I am using cygwin64 installed in C:/cygwin64, with eclipse and GTK2.0. Although include <gtk/gtk.h> is in the source, and C:/cygwin64/usr/include/gtk-2.0 is in the include path (I added it), many things in a gtk2 simple example are still not recognized, such as GtkWidget, gpointer, and GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL. I got the whole of GTK2 via cygwin setup. I was and am reluctant to download all of GTK2 separately and install it on top of cygwin, since wouldn't it result in multiple locations for the same thing? How may I resolve it? Would separate download and installation not result in redundancy, and possible alternate or even conflicting aliases?
A secondary question: I am confused about the general library requirements. Cygwin is a package which runs on Windows, but offers a Linux/unix-like interface. This argues that the libraries should be .a and .so. But since it is Windows, I also see a lot of .dll within C:\cygwin64. Normally, I would expect that only cygwin proper would contain .dll files and all other code would be Linux code. Yet that seems not to be the case. Often, I see both .dll and .so libraries with the same base name. Which is it, dll, or .so and .a, etc?
A tertiary question relating to the one above involves the main gtk2 library. The projected usage is not developing these programs, but just using GTK2 in applications. The documentation says to use glib, but there are many. Some are glib2.so, others glib2, or cygglib2.0.0.dll. Which of these is appropriate? or some other library? How do I set the exclipse LIBRARY path? (Since I unexpectedly encountered the problem with gtk.h, I am trying to anticipate and head off the corresponding problem with the library implementing gtk2.)
I develop and maintain a bioinformatics application suite of 50+ scripts and its deployment process is a mess:
Entire suite is in one big git repository. It has lots of CPAN dependencies, and dozens of internal modules as well.
Development platform is Linux.
Deployment platforms are Windows (20+ users), Mac (10+), Linux (2-3). Most are not 'power users'.
For windows, I have one installer (made with NSIS) for strawberry perl + required modules (ie, I installed strawberry on a windows box, installed all modules and zipped c:\strawberry), and another installer for the suite-- I did this b/c the suite is updated a lot more than the list of required modules.
For Mac, I bundle perl 5.14, all required cpan modules, and the application suite into a double-clickable installer. I don't use the system perl b/c it tends to be out of date. I bundle everything together unlike on windows b/c I suck at mac.
For Linux, I handle their installations manually since there are only a few of them, and they use different distros.
This is obviously a mess that grew organically over several generation of developers. Ideally I would like to create cpan-installable distributions out of the internal libraries and various groups of related scripts, and use module dependencies to let cpan install them for me.
But I'm not sure what the best approach for this is, b/c I'd still need distribute perl itself, would have to write some sort of non-command-line interface to CPAN, control the exact versions of 3rd party CPAN modules, point it by default to my "DarkPan" where I would store our modules, how I would push updates, etc. etc.
I don't think I can use PerlApp or Par since afaik those are for bundling single scripts, not an entire suite of them.
Any advice highly appreciated.
Besides the 3 platforms mentioned (more, if you count the Linux variants), you really have a couple different problems:
Deployment of a standard known-good Perl executable and libraries (CPAN modules).
Deployment of your Perl scripts and modules.
Once upon a time, I supported a large Solaris Perl installation. I tried for a while to stand up a Linux Perl installation "side-by-side", re-using the same CPAN modules. Didn't work. The big problem for me is that a fair number of Perl modules require compilation, which means they target a specific platform. I ended up just with 2 installs, and always remembered to install a new CPAN module in both areas.
We're now 100% Windows, so I don't have the same issue. However, we do run Perl off a shared network drive. All the users map this drive, and run a Registry script that associates .PL files with the network install of Perl. (See my answer to this other Perl question.)
So, besides the mapped drive and the Registry script, users don't need to install anything. Even the CPAN modules are picked up from the network. This solves item #1 (for Windows only users).
Same thing holds true for item #2: the scripts are stored on a network drive (same one) and the users run another Registry script to include the scripts folder in their search PATH. We edit our scripts in one area, and have a "Check-In 'n Release" ("CINR") that we use to, well, check-in and release scripts to the area the users point to. The users can double-click the scripts in Explorer, run them in DOS, or even better yet get them included in the contextual-menu in Explorer, etc. (Actually, we use a .NET application to map the drive and make all these settings for the user, but it can be done much simpler.)
So, how does this help with the other platforms, Linux and Mac? As I ran into with my Solaris/Linux experiment, I think you're stuck with different Perl installation for all 3 platforms, although you should be able to reach the same network drive for your Perl scripts and modules.
The Perl installation might even be OK on a network drive for the Linux users. It's probably easier for them than the Windows users. Mac users are tough. I administer a home Mac network, and I think network drives are very difficult to do in Mac OS X compared to other OSes. It should be as easy as in Linux since so much is the same, but there are very strange problems (for me) mapping NFS and SMB drives. AFP drives are a little easier for the user to map manually, but not so easy to map programmatically.
My Mac recommendation is to try using Platypus. It's definitely great at bundling scripts into a double-clickable application, although your interface options are limited to output only (no user input allowed during execution that I can tell). Not sure if you could put an entire Perl installation into the Platypus app or not, but if you could the paths figured out, you might be able to.
Good luck!
You may wish to check out CAVA packager. It can deal with multiple scripts in a single package.
I posted this question looking for something similar to Buildout for Perl. I think Shipwright is what I'm looking for but I'm not really sure. I've played around with it and I created a project, imported all of my source and dependencies and I've exported everything to a vessel then the documentation sort of just stopped. What do I do with a shipyard vessel? Do I do my actual development work in the vessel, or do I do my development in the Shipyard? I'm assuming that the vessel is only for deployment, but how do I actually deploy a vessel to a web server (say I'm using linux, apache and just running straight cgi).
Is Shipwright the right thing for what I'm trying to accomplish or is there something else that would be more appropriate? Ideally I could use Shipwright similar to how I use Buildout. I use Buildout to create a nice isolated environment for my development, and also I use Buildout when deploying to live servers to manage all of my application's dependencies.
EDIT: Here are the highlights of what I can do with Buildout that I would like to be able to do in Perl.
With Buildout, I have a file in my codebase that lists dependencies (which for Perl would either be CPAN modules or other source repositories). I can run a bootstrap script that will fetch all of those dependencies and drop them into a directory within my project and NOT install them at a system level. Buildout also creates utility scripts which can do anything you want (run tests, other command line tools, anything really) and those scripts explicitly add the dependencies to the path so that as my scripts are running all of my dependencies are available to be imported.
What this really does very well is that it allows me to manage my dependencies without having to ever install anything at a system level. Which makes changing from one version to another very easy. Also, it allows me to have multiple Buildout projects running on the same system using different versions of the same module. Finally, one huge benefit is that with Buildout's directory structure, I can just commit the dependencies to source control and to deploy to a new machine I just need to do a checkout and all of my dependencies are already satisfied without having to touch anything installed at a system level.
I don't think you'll find anything exactly like Buildout in Perl, but you could put together a couple of things that would do the trick.
You could use a standard Build.PL script for Module::Build for managing your dependencies and having commands to run tests, etc.
Then you could use cpanminus to do the installation of those dependencies into a local (non-system) directory.
Then you might be able to use Shipwright to do the bundling and deployment of the project with these now-local dependencies.
I am trying to set up an application dependant on few Perl modules, but the server I am installing to, does not have Internet connection. I read about offline module installs via ppd files, however I would have to resolve all the dependencies one by one.. All the more tedious considering I don't have direct internet connection.
I am hoping to find a solution, where I install ActivePerl on my PC and install all the libraries that I want and then copy paste the directories to my server. If it is just a matter of fixing some environment variables, that would be fine. Just want to know the definitive list of variables to modify. Not sure whether it is mandatory to install the perl libraries on the computer in which it is intended to run? (One is 32 bit platform and other one is 64 bit, but the server is already running various 32 bit applications so I hope it is not a major problem) For best compatibility, I plan to install ActivePerl on both the systems and merge the library directories to be identical.
The answer was on Perl FAQ, my bad didn't go through it properly.
I copied the perl binary from one machine to another, but scripts don't work.
That's probably because you forgot libraries, or library paths differ.
You really should build the whole distribution on the machine it will
eventually live on, and then type "make install". Most other approaches
are doomed to failure.
One simple way to check that things are in the right place is to print
out the hard-coded #INC that perl looks through for libraries:
% perl -le 'print for #INC'
If this command lists any paths that don't exist on your system, then
you may need to move the appropriate libraries to these locations, or
create symbolic links, aliases, or shortcuts appropriately. #INC is also
printed as part of the output of
% perl -V
You might also want to check out "How do I keep my own module/library
directory?" in perlfaq8.
From this link
Occasionally, you will not be able to
use any of the methods to install
modules. This may be the case if you
are a particularly under-privileged
user - perhaps you are renting web
space on a server, where you are not
given rights to do anything.
It is possible, for some modules, to
install the module without compiling
anything, and so you can just drop the
file in place and have it work.
Without going into a lot of the
detail, some Perl modules contain a
portion written in some other language
(such as C or C++) and some are
written in just in Perl. It is the
latter type that this method will work
for. How will you know? Well, if there
are no files called something.c and
something.h in the package, chances
are that it is a module that contains
only Perl code.
In these cases, you can just unpack
the file, and then copy just the *.pm
files to a directory from which you
will run the modules. Two examples of
this should suffice to illustrate how
this is done.
IniConf.pm is a wonderful little
module that allows you to read
configuration information out of a
.ini-style config file. IniConf.pm is
written only in Perl, and has no C
portion. When you unpack the .tar.gz
file that you got from CPAN, you will
find several files in there, and one
of them is called IniConf.pm. This is
the only file that you are actually
interested in. Copy that file to the
directory where you have the Perl
programs that will be using this
module. You can then use the module as
you would if it was installed
``correctly,'' with just the line:
use IniConf;
Time::CTime is another very handy
module that lets you print times in
any format that strikes your fancy. It
is written just in Perl, without a C
component. You will install it just
the same way as you did with IniConf,
except that the file, called CTime.pm,
must be placed in a subdirectory
called Time. The colons, as well as
indicating an organization of modules,
also indicates a directory structure
on your file system.
Being very new to Perl but not to dynamic languages, I'm a bit surprised at how not straight forward the manage of modules is.
Sure, cpan X does theoretically work, but I'm working on the same project from three different machines and OSs (at work, at home, testing in an external environment).
At work (Windows 7) I have problem using cpan because of our firewall that makes ftp unusable
At home (Mac OS X) it does work
In the external environment (Linux CentOs) it worked after hours because I don't have root access and I had to configure cpan to operate as a non-root user
I've tried on another server where I have an access. If the previous external environment is a VPS and so I have a shell access, this other one is a cheap shared hosting where I have no way to install new modules other than the ones pre-installed
At the moment I still can't install Template under Windows. I've seen that as an alternative I could compile it and I've also tried ActiveState's PPM but the module is not existent there.
Now, my perplexity is about Perl being a dynamic language. I've had all these kind of problems while working, for example, with C where I had to compile all the libraries for all the platform, but I thought that with Perl the approach would have been very similar to Python's or PHP's where in 90% of the cases copying the module in a directory and importing it simply works.
So, my question: if Perl's modules are written in Perl, why the copy/paste approach will not work? If some (or some part) of the modules have to be compiled, how to see in CPAN if a module is Perl-only or it relies upon compiled libraries? Isn't there a way to download the module (tar, zip...) and use cpan to deploy it? This would solve my problem under Windows.
Now, Perl is a dynamic language, but that doesn't imply that everything that people write is portable across platforms. That's not the fault of the language. It's not even the fault of the programmer. Some things, like Win32::OLE shouldn't work on Unix. :)
Other dynamic languages will have some of the same problems. If you have to compile C code, you won't be able to merely copy files to another machine. Some distributions configure the code slightly differently depending on your operating system, etc.
Even if you could copy files, you have to ensure that you copy all of the files that you need. Do you know everything that you need for a particular module? Remember, many of them have dependencies.
Most of the problems you're having aren't anything to do with the language. You're having trouble with the tools. If you want a zero conf CPAN tool that makes all the decisions for you, try cpanminus. It's mostly the same thing that you'd get out of cpan (although different code), but it makes all of the decisions for you. It doesn't run any of the distribution tests, and it installs into your user directory. When you need something that gives you control, come back to cpan.
In the external environment (Linux CentOs) it worked after hours because I don't have root access and I had to configure cpan to operate as a non-root user
This is one of those times when it helps to know The Trick. In this case local::lib, which lets you configure a non-root install area and all the ENV variables in about three minutes.
if perl's modules are written in perl, why the copy/past approach will not work?
Some are written in Pure Perl, but many are written partially in C (using Perl's XS API) for efficiency.
Sometimes you end up with situations like JSON::XS, JSON::PP and JSON::Any to autoselect the best one that is installed.
Isn't there a way to download the module (tar, zip...) and use cpan to deploy it?
The cpan program is all about getting things from the Internet. You can download the package (there will be a link along the lines of "Download: CGI.pm-3.49.tar.gz" on the right hand side of the CPAN page), untar it, then
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install
You would probably be better off configuring your cpan installation to use only HTTP sources (in the urllist config option). Possibly going to far as to create a mini CPAN mirror inside your network.