Following best practices is a good way to create maintainable and readable code and should always be encouraged. However, learning what these best practices are and when they apply in the context of your code can be hard to determine. Luckily, there are several tools to help guide you on your way.
All code that are present with MIP has to be processed by both Perltidy and Perlcritic.
MIP supplies a bash script that runs Perlcritic and Perltidy on perl scripts. Perltidy modifies the files in place and the files are then analyzed by Perl critic with a level 1 severity with a few exceptions as specified in the .perlcriticrc_mip file.
Which files to operate on are supplied on the command line. If no files are given the script uses git status to check for new and modified perl scripts and uses that as input.
## Run mip-check on newly edited files
bash mip-check
## Run mip-check on two files at level 2 severity
bash mip-check -s 2 somefile1.pl somefile2.pm
## Run mip-check on all files in a directory
bash mip-check lib/MIP/Check/*Perlcritic is a Perl source code analyzer. It is the executable front-end to the Perl::Critic engine, which attempts to identify awkward, hard to read, error-prone, or unconventional constructs in your code. Most of the rules are based on Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices.
Perl critic allows different degrees of severity. Severity values are integers ranging from 1 (least severe) to 5 (most severe) when analyzing your code. You can also use the severity names if you think it hard to remember the meaning of the integers (1 = brutal and 5 = gentle). The level is controlled with the '--severity' flag. There is also a verbose flag, to print more information about the identified deviations from the perl critic best practises. There are 11 levels of verbosity.
perlcritic --severity 4 --verbose 11 my_perl_script.pl
Perl critic also has web interface to instantly analyze your code.
Perltidy is a Perl script which indents and reformats Perl scripts to make them easier to read. If you write Perl scripts, or spend much time reading them, you will probably find it useful. Perltidy is an excellent way to automate the code standardisation with minimum of effort.
perltidy somefile.pl
This will produce a file somefile.pl.tdy containing the script reformatted using the default options, which approximate the style suggested in perlstyle(1). The source file somefile.pl is unchanged.
perltidy -b -bext='/' file1.pl file2.pl
Create backups of files and modify files in place. The backup files file1.pl.bak and file2.pl.bak will be deleted if there are no errors.