Dist::Zilla - Maximum Overkill for CPAN Distributions

Sharing your awesome code with the world is fun and rewarding, and the CPAN is a great distribution mechanism. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of boring maintenance involved in the process, above and beyond just writing awesome code. Dist::Zilla is a framework for automating every part of your packaging and release cycle. It builds an installer, writes out boilerplate files, determines your prerequisite libraries, rewrites your documentation, updates the changelog, interacts with your version control system, and uploads your release to the CPAN.

Because it only runs on the author’s machine, it’s free to have outlandish requirements and execution costs, but the released code has no special prerequistes and looks like any boring distribution from the installer’s perspective. Because it’s primarily a framework for plugins, the behavior of Dist::Zilla can be customized from minimal release automation to maximum overkill. Hundreds of CPAN distributions have already switched to Dist::Zilla to harness its power.

This presentation will cover writing new distributions using Dist::Zilla as well as converting existing distributions. The existing plugins will be explained, along with common configurations. It will cover writing new plugins and plugin bundles.