Module::Loader - finding and loading modules in a given namespace

NAME  SYNOPSIS  DESCRIPTION  new  METHODS  find_modules  search  load  max_depth  SEE ALSO  REPOSITORY  AUTHOR  COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 

NAME

Module::Loader − finding and loading modules in a given namespace

SYNOPSIS

use Module::Loader;
my $loader = Module::Loader−>new;
my @plugins = $loader−>find_modules('MyApp::Plugin');
foreach my $plugin (@plugins) {
$loader−>load($plugin);
}

DESCRIPTION

This module provides methods for finding modules in a given namespace, and then loading them. It is intended for use in situations where you’re looking for plugins, and then loading one or more of them.

This module was inspired by Mojo::Loader, which I have used in a number of projects. But some people were wary of requiring Mojolicious just to get a module loader, which prompted me to create "Module::Loader".

Note: this module was initially called "Plugin::Loader", but I realised that "Module::Loader" was a more appropriate name.

new

When instantiating "Module::Loader", you can optionally set the "max_depth" attribute, which limits the search depth when looking for modules.

my $loader = Module::Loader−>new(max_depth => 1);

Let’s say you have all of the CPAN plugins for the template toolkit installed locally. If you don’t specify "max_depth", then find_modules('Template::Plugin') would return Template::Plugin::Filter::Minify::JavaScript as well as Template::Plugin::File. If you set "max_depth" to 1, then you’d get the latter but not the former.

Why might you want to do that?

You might have a convention where plugins are the modules immediately within the specified namespace, but that each plugin can have additional modules within its own namespace.

So typically you’ll either not set "max_depth", or you’ll set it to 1.

METHODS

find_modules

Takes a namespace, and returns all installed modules in that namespace, that were found in @INC. For example:

@plugins = $loader−>find_modules('Template::Plugin');

By default this will find all modules in the given namespace, unless you’ve specified a maximum search depth, as described above. You can also specify "max_depth" when you call the method:

@plugins = $loader−>find_modules('Template::Plugin',
{ max_depth => 1 });

search

This is the same as find_modules() above, but it hard-codes the search depth to 1. This method is provided for compatibility with Mojo::Loader:

@plugins = $loader−>search('Template::Plugin');

It just calls find_modules() with "max_depth" set to 1, as shown above.

load

Takes a module name and tries to load the module.

$loader−>load('MyModule::Plugin::Spank');

If loading fails, then we "croak".

max_depth

Returns the value of the "max_depth", if it was passed to the constructor, otherwise "undef".

SEE ALSO

Mojo::Loader was the inspiration for this module, but has a slightly different interface. In particular, it has "max_depth" hard-coded to 1.

Module::Pluggable is effectively a role which gives a class the ability to find plugins within its namespace.

Module::Pluggable::Ordered is similar to Module::Pluggable, but lets you control the order in which modules are loaded.

all will load all modules in a given namespace, eg with "use all 'IO::*';"

lib::require::all will load all modules found in a given directory (as opposed to a namespace).

MAD::Loader provides functions for loading modules, but not for finding them.

Module::Find provides a number of functions for finding and loading modules. It provides different functions depending on whether you want to limit the search depth to 1 or not: "findallmod" vs "findsubmod".

Module::Recursive::Require will load all modules in a given namespace, and return a list of the modules found / loaded. It lets you provide regexps for filtering out certain namespaces.

Module::Require provides two functions, "require_regex" and "require_glob" which will load all locally installed modules whose name matches a pattern (specified as a regular expression or glob-style pattern).

REPOSITORY

<https://github.com/neilbowers/Module−Loader>

AUTHOR

Neil Bowers <[email protected]>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2014 by Neil Bowers <[email protected]>.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.


Updated 2024-01-29 - jenkler.se | uex.se