Here's what I'm currently using, although it's admittedly not CPAN-compatible, since I use
git to deploy my webapps, so CPAN isn't a concern for them. Assuming I'm building My Web App:
- ~/src/my_web_app/
- TODO
- MyWebApp/
- (general project-specific modules defining the underlying object/data model)
- CGI/
- (plugin modules for connecting the object/data model to the web interface)
- cgi/
- index.fcgi
- tpl/
- (page-generation templates)
- (other misc files which need to be accessible by web)
- local/
- (misc host-specific support files which, for whatever reason, aren't put into the main git repo)
- t/
- util/
- (any command-line tools specific to the project, including cron scripts)
With this structure, installing on a new host is a simple matter of cloning the project out of
git and symlinking the
cgi/ directory into the host's web root. Depending on how the host's operating system handles paths doing a
../ from a symlinked directory, it may also be necessary to symlink
MyWebApp/ into one of the dirs in
@INC, but that's usually not required, thanks to
FindBin. (Obviously, I only work with *nix-derived OSes. I don't know whether Windows has a suitable equivalent to symlinks or, if it does, what that might be.)
If I were to want to build a CPAN distribution out of one of these projects, I would expect it to mostly just be a matter of creating a distribution dir (call it dist/ and symlinking the relevant bits into it - MyWebApp/ into dist/lib/, t/ into dist/ to replace the default dist/t/, and cgi/ and util/ to... well... I don't know where because I've never packaged executables for CPAN, only modules.
