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Dynamically load Perl library modules based on script location - Last Modified 2010-02-24 20:56 UTC - Created 2009-04-24 17:06 UTC

I have some useful code that I use for scripts that need to load Perl library modules from a sub-folder in the directory where the script resides.

This works well when for example you need to run a script on a machine where you can't install Perl modules into the system Perl. It's also nice in that you can bundle your script and libraries into a single archive for distribution and only have to decompress the archive to install everything.

# This will dyanmically load the script directory as a perl library path
# This allows us to not require installing external libaries into perl
BEGIN {
	my $myScriptLoc = "";
	use File::Spec::Functions qw(rel2abs);
	use File::Basename qw(dirname);
	# Perl always makes $0 work if it is actually a file (and not perl -e code)
	$myScriptLoc = dirname(rel2abs($0));
	push(@INC, "$myScriptLoc/lib");
}

Note that if you try this in a CGI script you will get an error if taint checking is enforced. You have to use use lib qw(.) instead.