This video demonstrates how to use Activestate Platform’s CLI interface, the State Tool to install Perl environments generally. For purposes of this demo, we compare two web frameworks: Mojolicious versus Dancer. As a best practice, you could set up a couple of working directories, install Perl in each of them, and then download Mojo and Dancer, along with a bunch of their plugins. 

But that sounds like a lot of work for a simple exercise, so instead use the State Tool, in conjunction with the ActiveState Platform to make things easy.

Written in Go, the State Tool is designed to (ultimately) be a cross-platform, universal package manager for dynamic open source language runtimes. Currently, it supports Python and Perl, and can be installed on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Building Perl environments with a single command is one example of the many tasks the State Tool can do for developers. You could use it to reclaim coding time by automating with a standard repeatable solution, all the one-off tasks that suck the joy out of a developer’s day – run scripts (cross-platform, any language), handle events (with a painless environment setup) and manage secrets (easily yet securely).

To give it a try, install the State Tool on Windows, Linux or macOS today. Here are some introductory guidelines to get you started on the right foot. To follow along the steps shown in the video, you will need to sign into the platform on both the web and CLI. It’s free for the developer community to use!