We strongly recommend using metacpan-developer, this will give you a virtual machine already configured and ready to start developing on.

$ vagrant ssh
$ cd $HOME/metacpan-web
$ sudo service starman_metacpan-web restart

You'll find some log files in var/logs.

If you prefer not to use the VM, the following commands will get you started: commands can be converted to:

$ carton install
$ ./bin/prove t
$ carton exec plackup -p 5001 -r

The backend 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 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                 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.