We strongly recommend using metacpan-docker. This will give you a virtual machine already configured and ready to start developing on.
If you prefer not to use Docker, the following commands will get you started:
$ carton install
$ npm install
$ export PATH="$(realpath ./node_modules/.bin):$PATH"
$ ./bin/prove t
$ carton exec plackup -p 5001 -r
To run the tests in parallel, add -j8 (or however many CPUs you have) to the
prove command.
The back end defaults to fastapi.metacpan.org. Running a local API server is
optional and not required to hack on the front end. The address to the API
being used can be changed in the metacpan_web.conf file. Ideally you would create a
new file called metacpan_web_local.conf that contains
api http://127.0.0.1:5000
api_secure http://127.0.0.1:5000
api_external_secure http://127.0.0.1:5000
which will be loaded on top of the existing config file.
On Win32 (and possibly also on other platforms) when using Perl < 5.12, the server started with plackup will generate warnings relating to date parsing. These are caused by Plack due to a bug in the gmtime implementation and can be removed by upgrading to Perl 5.12.