CPAN Meta DB

This is (yet another) CPAN metadata database that provides REST API for the CPAN distributions, intended to be used by CPAN clients such as cpanminus. See also MetaCPAN API, CPANDB and CPANIDX for the similar works.

APIs

/v1.0/package/Package::Name

Returns the latest distribution file path that contains the package and its version string ('undef' is a valid version string) in YAML format. Returns 404 status code if the package is not found. (Example)

/v1.0/history/Package::Name

Returns the list of version and distfile containing the given package in PAUSE history since 2012/03/31, in text/plain format as you find in PAUSE's 02packages.details.txt. Returns 404 if the package is not found. (Example)

Notes

By using CPAN Meta DB through cpanm, you're sending names of modules you try to install, the version of cpanm and IP address to the server. The information also includes your local perl version if you use cpanm 1.6004 or later. You can opt it out by either setting --mirror-only option to avoid using this DB service, or by setting --no-report-perl-version since version 1.6008 to skip reporting your local perl version.

The collected data is stored securely on the application server after hashing the IP address to be anonymized. The data is used for making the service more reliable (e.g. blacklisting DoS attacks) and for data mining purposes such as perl version stats. Unmasked IP addresses are never stored, published nor shared with third parties, except Fastly (terms) who is our CDN partner and serves the cached content on behalf of our servers.