The first step in deploying your application is to copy your application from your development/build environment to your production environment. This may sound trivial, but it's important to make sure that your process is easy and repeatable. If you require every step to be done manually, it's likely that at some point (under the pressure of short maintenance windows), something will be missed and your users will be unhappy. Are you sure you remembered to install every dependency, update the source tree on every server in the farm, change permissions, and edit configuration files appropriately?
Fortunately, Catalyst makes it easy to carry out the deployment correctly. If you've been diligent about keeping the dependencies in your
Makefile.PL
up-to-date, then you'll find it very easy to manage dependencies and the application itself.
Let's start with a quick run-through of the Makefile.PL
build process. We will use Makefile.PL
twice, once on the build system (to build the package) and...