NAME

Test::Prereq - check if Makefile.PL has the right pre-requisites

SYNOPSIS

        # if you use Makefile.PL
        use Test::More;
        eval "use Test::Prereq";
        plan skip_all => "Test::Prereq required to test dependencies" if $@;
        prereq_ok();

        # specify a perl version, test name, or module names to skip
        prereq_ok( $version, $name, \@skip );

        # if you use Module::Build
        use Test::More;
        eval "use Test::Prereq::Build";
        plan skip_all => "Test::Prereq::Build required to test dependencies" if $@;
        prereq_ok();

        # or from the command line for a one-off check
        perl -MTest::Prereq -eprereq_ok

    #The prerequisites test take quite some time so the following construct is
    #recommended for non-author testers
        use Test::More;
        eval "use Test::Prereq::Build";

        my $msg;
        if ($@) {
            $msg = 'Test::Prereq::Build required to test dependencies';
        } elsif (not $ENV{TEST_AUTHOR}) {
            $msg = 'Author test.  Set $ENV{TEST_AUTHOR} to a true value to run.';
        }
        plan skip_all => $msg if $msg;
        prereq_ok();

DESCRIPTION

The "prereq_ok()" function examines the modules it finds in blib/lib/, blib/script, and the test files it finds in t/ (and test.pl). It figures out which modules they use and compares that list of modules to those in the "PREREQ_PM" section of Makefile.PL.

If you use "Module::Build" instead, see Test::Prereq::Build instead.

Warning about redefining ExtUtils::MakeMaker::WriteMakefile

"Test::Prereq" has its own version of "ExtUtils::MakeMaker::WriteMakefile" so it can run the Makefile.PL and get the argument list of that function. You may see warnings about this.

FUNCTIONS

prereq_ok( [ VERSION, [ NAME [, SKIP_ARRAY] ] ] )

Tests Makefile.PL to ensure all non-core module dependencies are in "PREREQ_PM". If you haven't set a testing plan already, "prereq_ok()" creates a plan of one test.

If you don't specify a version, "prereq_ok" assumes you want to compare the list of prerequisite modules to the version of perl running the test.

Valid versions come from "Module::CoreList" (which uses $]).

        #!/usr/bin/perl
        use Module::CoreList;
        print map "$_\n", sort keys %Module::CoreList::version;

"prereq_ok" attempts to remove modules found in lib/ and libraries found in t/ from the reported prerequisites.

The optional third argument is an array reference to a list of names that "prereq_ok" should ignore. You might want to use this if your tests do funny things with "require".

Versions prior to 1.038 would use CPAN.pm to virtually include prerequisites in distributions that you declared explicitly. This isn't really a good idea. Some modules have moved to different distributions, so you should just specify all the modules that you use instead of relying on a particular distribution to provide them. Not only that, expanding distributions with CPAN.pm takes forever.

If you want the old behavior, set the "TEST_PREREQ_EXPAND_WITH_CPAN" environment variable to a true value.

TO DO

set up a couple fake module distributions to test
warn about things that show up in "PREREQ_PM" unnecessarily

SOURCE AVAILABILITY

This source is in Github:

        http://github.com/briandfoy/test-prereq

CONTRIBUTORS

Many thanks to:

Andy Lester, Slavin Rezić, Randal Schwartz, Iain Truskett, Dylan Martin

AUTHOR

brian d foy, "<bdfoy@cpan.org>"