Editing CPAN (section)

==Components==
The distribution infrastructure of CPAN consists of its worldwide network of more than 250 mirrors in more than 60 countries.<ref name="cpan-SITES">{{cite web|url=http://www.cpan.org/SITES.html|title=CPAN Mirror Network|access-date=16 November 2016}}</ref> Each full mirror hosts around 36 [[gigabyte]]s of data.<ref name="mirror-howto">{{cite web|url=http://www.cpan.org/misc/how-to-mirror.html|access-date=22 August 2024|title=How to mirror CPAN|publisher=CPAN.org}}</ref>

Most mirrors update themselves hourly, daily or bidaily from the CPAN master site.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.cs.uu.nl/stats/mirmon/cpan.html|title=CPAN Status and Statistics|access-date=9 May 2010}}</ref> Some sites are major FTP servers which mirror lots of other software, but others are simply servers owned by companies that use Perl heavily. There are at least two mirrors on every continent except Antarctica.

Several search engines have been written to help Perl programmers sort through the CPAN. The official {{URL|search.cpan.org}} includes textual search, a browsable index of modules, and extracted copies of all distributions currently on the CPAN. On 16 May 2018, the Perl Foundation announced that search.cpan.org would be shut down on 29 June 2018 (after 19 years of operation), due to its aging codebase and maintenance burden. Users will be transitioned and redirected to the third-party alternative MetaCPAN.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://log.perl.org/2018/05/goodbye-search-dot-cpan-dot-org.html |title=The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org |website=log.perl.org |language=en |access-date=22 May 2018}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.perl.com/article/saying-goodbye-to-search-cpan-org/ |title=Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org |website=perl.com |language=en |access-date=26 June 2018}}</ref>

CPAN Testers are a group of volunteers, who will download and test distributions as they are uploaded to CPAN. This enables the authors to have their modules tested on many platforms and environments to which they otherwise lack access, thus improving portability, and quality. Smoke testers send reports, which are then collated and used for a variety of presentation websites, including the main reports site, statistics, and dependencies.

Authors can upload new distributions to the CPAN through the ''Perl Authors Upload Server'' (PAUSE). To do so, they must request a PAUSE account.

Once registered, they may use a web interface at [https://pause.perl.org pause.perl.org], or an [[File Transfer Protocol|FTP]] interface to upload files to their directory and delete them. Modules in the upload will only be indexed as canonical if the module name has not been used before (granting ''first-come'' permission to the uploader), or if the uploader has permission for that name, and if the module is a higher version than any existing entry.<ref>{{cite web |title=PAUSE Operating Model |website=[[GitHub]] |url=https://github.com/andk/pause/blob/master/doc/operating-model.md |access-date=20 December 2019}}</ref> This can be specified through PAUSE's web interface.