Installing ActivePerl for Linux

Installing ActivePerl using the State Tool (beta)

The State Tool is the command line interface (CLI) for the ActiveState Platform. You can use it to authenticate with the Platform, and then download and configure your ActivePerl 5.26 runtime environment.

  1. If you don’t already have the State Tool installed, open your command prompt and run the following command to set it up:

    sh <(curl -q https://platform.activestate.com/dl/cli/install.sh)

    You can specify the directory to install the State Tool into using the -t flag.

    sh <(curl -q https://platform.activestate.com/dl/cli/install.sh) -t ~/bin

    Follow the prompts in the command prompt and then open a new command prompt or source your .profile file to complete the installation and configuration.

  2. Run state activate ActiveState/ActivePerl-5.26. This command downloads the runtime environment from the ActiveState Platform, configures it, and creates an “activated state”, an isolated environment for you to work in.

Installing ActivePerl using the tarball installer

Prerequisites

  • Hardware: 200 MB hard disk space for typical install
  • Operating System: Linux distribution using glibc 2.15 or later (e.g. Ubuntu 12.04)
  • Online Help: Web browser

Installing ActivePerl on Linux

The installer allows installation as an unprivileged user into a user-specified path. GNU tar is required for extracting the files. See Known Issues in the ActivePerl Release Notes for details.

Download the distribution to a temporary directory, extract the files, switch to the extracted ActivePerl directory, and then run the script install.sh. The installation script will prompt you to accept the license agreement and to specify the target installation directory.

% tar zxf ActivePerl-<version>.tar.gz
% cd ActivePerl-<version>/
% ./install.sh

If you share the system with other people, or if you do not have root access, it is recommended that you install ActivePerl in your own user directory. For example:

/home/<username>/ActivePerl-5.26

We suggest adding the following line to your shell configuration file (e.g. .profile, .bashrc, or .cshrc) file to auto-load this path whenever you open a new terminal window, log on, etc.:

PATH=$PATH:/home/<username>/bin

Also, we suggest that you create symbolic links to the binaries:

mkdir /home/<username>/bin
ln -s /home/<username>/ActivePerl-5.26/bin/perl /home/<username>/bin/perl

This will allow you to call ActivePerl with a command like:

perl -e 'print "Hello World!\n"'

Uninstalling ActivePerl on Linux

You can uninstall ActivePerl by removing the directory where it was installed, because the ActivePerl installation is fully contained in that directory. For example:

sudo /bin/rm -rf /opt/ActivePerl-5.26