Getting a Perl installation running with WAMP

Recently I had to debug a perl-based website (don’t ask). In getting my PC set up to do this, I realized that things have changed in the past 8 years – the last time I was forced to do lucky enough to have the opportunity to do any perl development. These were the steps:

1. WAMP no longer ships with mod_perl apparently. It was definitely available as an add-on for a previous version, but I guess no longer. So as per this blog post, download and install ActivePerl.
2. That gets installed to C:\Perl\bin so with each of your scripts you’ll have to change the path to perl in the header of each of your perl scripts.
3. In your httpd.conf, make sure you have added the “.pl” ScriptHandler and enabled ExecCGI in the appropriate directory if your scripts are outside /cgi-bin/.

   ...
   AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
   ...
   <Directory />
       AllowOverride All
       Options FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
       Order allow,deny
       Allow from all
   </Directory>

4. Your life will be a lot easier if you output the errors to your browser rather than sifting through the Apache log, so I used this everywhere:

   #!C:/Perl/bin/perl.exe -w
   use strict;
   use CGI;
   use CGI::Carp qw(warningsToBrowser fatalsToBrowser);

5. You may have to install other CPAN modules to get real-life scripts working. The shell is located in C:\Perl\bin as well.
6. You might need to connect to the WAMP database. I could only get this to work by installing the DBD-MySQL PPD from outside the ActiveState repository. So run

   C:\Perl\bin\ppm install http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/PPMPackages/10xx/DBD-mysql.ppd

   Then you can access your DB via:

   #!C:/Perl/bin/perl.exe -w
   use strict;
   use CGI;
   use CGI::Carp qw(warningsToBrowser fatalsToBrowser); 
   use DBI;
   my $DSN = "dbi:mysql:database=dbname;host=localhost;port=3306";
   my $dbh = DBI->connect($DSN, "root", "", {RaiseError=>1}); 
   print "// CONNECT ERROR: ".$DBI::errstr."\n";
   ...

Enjoy.