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Installing DBD::mysql on Strawberry Perl is really easy!

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DBD::mysql is the driver for the Perl DBI database interface. Basically, if you want to interact with your MySQL or MariaDB  server from Perl, this is the driver you’d use.

I co-maintain the driver and heard people complaining that it’s difficult to install it on Windows. This post basically explains that it’s not so bad.

It is already installed

First of all, you do know this right? It IS already installed with Strawberry Perl. Strawberry Perl is a very good distribution of Perl for Windows. Many of the nice modules you’d already want are available out of the box. See the list on the website for more details. There’s also ActiveState perl, more on that later.

Nevertheless, installing is easy

If you want to install it because you want a newer version or something like that, it’s pretty easy. Strawberry bundles the MySQL driver in [strawberry]/c/bin and ships with a batch file that acts as if it is mysql_config – this is very convenient.

The only problem is that the current version of DBD::mysql, 4.029, does not properly find it. You’d have to tell it where to look. This will be fixed in the next release of the driver. I already committed the fixes which was basically just deleting old code.

c:\> cpan
cpan> look DBD::mysql
> perl Makefile.PL --mysql_config=c:\strawberry\c\bin\mysql_config.bat
> dmake
> dmake install
> exit
cpan> quit

And that’s it!

Compiling against your own version of the libraries

Unfortunately, this is only really this easy because we compile against the version of the libraries bundled with Strawberry. Compiling against our own libraries, perhaps newer, or from MariaDB or so, is much more difficult at this point in time. Also, if you’d be using ActiveState Perl, you’d be out of luck. And of course, with ActiveState you can ppm install DBD-mysql but this only works if you’re on the current or previous-current perl because otherwise you’re behind a paywall and you’re out of luck.

I’ll be trying to make this easier (and promised it to Mithaldu) and will post more on that later.

As a bonus: RMSB8sZtJOIIAAL6fg

I was on Fosdem today where I met lots of nice people and had some interesting conversations. Here is a photo of RMS who was there handing out GNU slash Linux stickers.