What are best practices for working with carton for dependency management?

Carton is a dependency management tool for Perl applications, similar to Bundler for Ruby. Here are some best practices to follow when working with Carton:

  • Use a dedicated cpanfile: Always maintain a separate CPANfile to manage your application's dependencies. This facilitates tracking and sharing of the exact versions used.
  • Lock your dependencies: Run carton install to create a carton.lock file, ensuring that all team members and environments use the same versions of dependencies.
  • Keep your dependencies updated: Regularly check for updates and run carton update to update your cpanfile and carton.lock.
  • Use local installations: Avoid polluting the system Perl environment by using the local environment provided by Carton. This is achieved by running scripts using carton exec.
  • Document your dependencies: Provide clear documentation for your dependencies in the README to help others understand the requirements of your application.

Example

# Example of a cpanfile requires 'Mojo', '9.12'; requires 'DBI', '1.634'; # Example of installing dependencies my $result = carton install; print $result;

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