What are best practices for working with environment variables (PERL5LIB, PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT)?

When working with environment variables in Perl, such as PERL5LIB and PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT, it's important to adhere to certain best practices to ensure your applications run smoothly and maintain portability. Here are some best practices:

  • Use Local Library Paths: Instead of modifying global environment variables, consider using local library paths to keep dependencies contained within your project.
  • Document Environment Requirements: Clearly document the required environment variables for your project in your README or documentation files.
  • Check for Environment Variables: Before trying to use specific libraries or modules, check if the necessary environment variables are set, and handle cases where they are not gracefully.
  • Use .env Files for Local Development: When developing locally, consider using a `.env` file to store environment variables, and use a module like DOTenv to load them automatically.
  • Version Control Ignoring: Don't include sensitive information in version-controlled files. Use .gitignore to exclude files that contain environment variable configurations.

Example of setting environment variables in a script:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; # Check if PERL5LIB is set and print a message if (defined $ENV{'PERL5LIB'}) { print "PERL5LIB is set to: $ENV{'PERL5LIB'}\n"; } else { print "PERL5LIB is not set.\n"; } # Set PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT if not set $ENV{'PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT'} //= '/usr/local/lib/perl5'; print "PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT is: $ENV{'PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT'}\n";

Perl environment variables PERL5LIB PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT best practices

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