Dist::Zilla autocomplete

June 15th, 2010
dist-zillaPerl

Dist::Zilla autocomplete

Does anyone know of a Yak Shaving Anonymous association hackers addicted to Tibetan bovine shearing could join?

Anyway, here are two little things I hacked on top of Dist::Zilla that peeps might find useful.

The first, as hinted by the blog entry’s title, is a direct adaptation of Aristotle’s perldoc-complete for dzil.

$ dzil *<tab>* 
build     install   new       plugins   rjbsver   smoke     xtest     
clean     listdeps  nop       release   run       test      

The second is actually the one that started that round of shaving for me. As there is about a gazillion Dist::Zilla plugins, I wanted to have a quick way to see all the plugins installed on a specific machine. Enter a new dzil sub-command: plugins.

$ dzil plugins
[ lotsa plugins ]
MatchManifest - Ensure that MANIFEST is correct
MetaConfig - summarize Dist::Zilla configuration into distmeta
MetaJSON - produce a META.json
* MetaNoIndex - Stop CPAN from indexing stuff
MetaProvides - Generating and Populating 'provides' in your META.yml
MetaProvides::Class - Scans Dist::Zilla's .pm files and tries to identify classes using Class::Discover.
MetaProvides::FromFile - In the event nothing else works, pull in hand-crafted metadata from a specified file.
MetaProvides::Package - Extract namespaces/version from traditional packages for provides
* MetaResources - provide arbitrary "resources" for distribution metadata
MetaTests - common extra tests for META.yml
MetaYAML - produce a META.yml
[ still lotsa plugins ]

The plugins marked with an asterix are used by the current dist.ini. Also, give a plugin name to the sub-command, and it’ll act as a glorified perldoc Dist::Zilla::Plugin::*Plugin Name*. The sweet thing is, autocomplete also work there:

$ dzil plugins Pod<Tab>
PodCoverageTests  PodSyntaxTests    PodVersion        PodWeaver

Both patches are available on my Github fork of Dist::Zilla. Enjoy!