how-to-use-repl.md

How to use Perl REPL (re.pl)

NOTE: New to Perl? Check how to learn perl!

On your local dev instance, the "backend" container comes with Devel::REPL installed.

This is a handy package to try out perl expressions and learn.

Thanks to PERL5LIB variable which is already configured, you can load any module of ProductOpener from within it.

Launch Repl

Just run

docker compose run --rm backend re.pl

If you want to access external services (like mongodb), do not forget to start them.

NOTE: If you get "exec: re.pl: not found", it means you may not have dev tools installed. Try going in your .env (or .envrc) file and add the line:

CPANMOPTS=--with-develop --with-feature=off_server_dev_tools

then just make build and retry, you will then be able to run re.pl

Testing perl code

It can be a handy way to get your hand into perl by testing some code patterns, or seeing how they react.

For example one can test a regular expression:

$ my $text = "Hello World";
Hello World
$ $text =~ /Hello (\w+)/i
World

Reading a sto

Another use case is reading a .sto file to see what it contains.

Eg. for a user:

$ use ProductOpener::Store qw/:all/;
$ my $product_ref = retrieve("/mnt/podata/products/007/107/917/0260/product.sto");