About this series: A collection of short blog posts about lcpan tips/recipes. Some posts will also end up in the upcoming App::lcpan::Manual::Cookbook POD to be included in the App::lcpan distribution. First article is here. See the whole series.

About lcpan: an application to download and index a mini CPAN mirror on your local filesystem, so in effect you will have something like your own CPAN with a command-line tool (or perl API) to query and extract information from your mirror. I find it perfect for my own personal use when working offline.

One of the annoying things about using lcpan is how long it takes to create the index the first time (between 5 to 7 hours, depending on your computer's disk and CPU speed). Compared to CPAN::SQLite which only needs about a minute to create its SQLite database, lcpan takes significantly longer time because in addition to parsing authors/01mailrc.txt.gz and modules/02packages.details.txt.gz text files, it also extracts all release tarballs to get the distribution metadata as well as list of files. It also parses each module source code to extract mentions and list of subroutine names. But for that price, you also get more querying capabilities: dependencies, mentions, files inside tarballs, subroutines names, …

To cut down the time and encourage more people to try lcpan out, I've released App::lcpan::Bootstrap, which is just a packaging of a snapshot of the SQLite database. Creating your local index will now just take a few minutes. You need lcpan 1.029 or later to utilize the bootstrap automatically, or you can just decompress the share/db/index.db.xz as your index.db in the CPAN mirror top-level directory.