Install Dist::Zilla using your preferred CPAN client:

$ cpanm Dist::Zilla

Install the project dependencies:

$ dzil listdeps | cpanm

Start server on port 5000

$ plackup

The backend defaults to api.metacpan.org. Running a local API server is optional and not required to hack on the front-end. The address to the API user can be changed in the metacpan_web.conf file. Ideally you would create a new file called metacpan_web_local.conf that contains

api localhost:5000

which will be loaded on top of the existing config file.

$ plackup -p 5001 -r

This will use the API server at localhost:5000 and sets the port of the front-end to 5001. The process will watch changes in the /lib directory.

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.