A faster configuration for CPAN::Reporter

The idea of CPAN::Reporter is great: take advantage of all those daily uses of the cpan shell to collect reports from a large network of users.

I tried several times to enable CPAN::Reporter but I always found that it delayed just enough of my workflow that I found it a nuisance. After each test phase, it would start a SMTP connection and send the report. Those 3 or 4 seconds where a bit too much for me.

After a bit of reading I found a good compromise to report my test runs without affecting the performance. The setup is simple: make CPAN::Reporter write the test results to a directory and create a command to send them later.

To set this up, first you install CPAN::Reporter as usual and then you tweak the configuration to store the reports in a directory. My ~/.cpanreporter/config.ini looks like this:

email_from = "Pedro Melo" 
edit_report = no
send_report=unknown:yes fail:yes pass:yes na:no

transport=File /Users/melo/.cpan/reports

The trick is to use the File transport. You configure it with the directory where the test reports will be stored. In my case I choose /Users/melo/.cpan/reports. You need to make sure that directory exists.

From now on, every time you use the cpan shell to install a module, the test reports will be stored in you test report directory.

The final step is sending them. I wrote a simple script to take care of that, that you can find on my scripts repository: x-perl-send-test-reports (download).

How and when you run it is up to you. You can run it manually from time to time, or from a cron, or use something like folder actions to monitor the directory and start the script whenever a new file is placed there. I run it manually for now.

My command line to use the script is this:

x-perl-send-test-reports         \
    --from [email protected] \
    --server smtp.gmail.com      \
    --transport 'Net::SMTP::TLS
         User [email protected]
         Password my_password
         Port 587'               \
    ~/.cpan/reports

So one less excuse not to report your test results. If you are not using CPAN::Reporter, start now.