Re: Auto install of a perl package if 'use' statement fails

[tilly]

Yes. I've seen it done. I believe that Abigail did it, but I can't find the code.

Anyways the idea is simple. If you read the documentation for require, you'll find that you can put subroutines in @INC. Then you can pull tricks like this untested code:

use LWP::Simple qw(get);

BEGIN {
  push @INC, sub {
    shift;
    my $file = shift; # eg "Foo/Bar.pm"
    my $content = get("http://myrepository.com/modules/$file");
    if ($content) {
      open(my $fh, "<", \$content);
      return $fh;
    }
    else {
      return;
    }
  }
}

(This one grabs the module off of a webserver, and loads it directly. No local installation needed! With older versions of Perl you'll need IO::Scalar instead of the open trick that I used to put the contents of a scalar into a filehandle.)