Installing ack on cpanel

Question

I need to install ack on an instance of whm/cpanel (I have root access as it is a VPS) but I have not found any information on how to do that.

I tried to install it using the WHM RPM manager, but the install failed:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: centosk3.centos.org
 * epel: linux.mirrors.es.net
 * extras: centosi5.centos.org
 * updates: ftp.osuosl.org
Excluding Packages in global exclude list
Finished
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package ack.noarch 0:1.96-1.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: perl(File::Next) >= 0.40 for package: ack
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
ack-1.96-1.el5.noarch from epel has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: perl(File::Next) >= 0.40 is needed by package ack-1.96-1.el5.noarch (epel)
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
                        package-cleanup --dupes
                        rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
The program package-cleanup is found in the yum-utils package.

Any advice?

Answer 1

It is safe to manually install things from cpan on cPanel hosts. The system modules will not conflict with the modules that cPanel itself uses. You can install ack manually with cpan:

cpan ack

Answer 2

I suspect there is something missing on the "fastest mirror" repo that you're pulling from. I would temporarily disable that plugin to see if you're able to get the package perl(File::Next). I just installed ack on CentOS and was able to do so.

To disable a single plugin or all plugins run one of the following yum commands.

$ sudo yum --disableplugin=fastestmirror install ack

-or-

$ sudo yum --noplugins install ack

Answer 3

Note that you can download ack as a single file that you drop in your ~/bin directory. No root privs needed or CPAN installs necessary.

See http://beyondgrep.com/install/ for details.