Dist::Zilla::UtilRole::MaybeZilla "Dist::Zilla" Is Great. Long Live "Dist::Zilla" But when you're writing a utility class, loading "Dist::Zilla" may be not necessary, and can make testing things harder. Namely, because to test anything that requires "Dist::Zilla", requires that you have a valid build tree, which may be lots of unnecessary work if you only need "dzil" for simple things like error logging. Or perhaps, you have other resources that you only conventionally fetch from "dzil", such as the "dzil build-root", for the sake of making a "Git::Wrapper", but you're quite happy with passing "Git::Wrapper" instances directly for testing. And I found myself doing quite a lot of the latter, and re-writing the same code everywhere to do it. So, this role provides a "zilla" attribute that is ONLY required if something directly calls "$self->zilla", and it fails on invocation. And provides a few utility methods, that will try to use "zilla" where possible, but fallback to a somewhat useful default if those are not available to you. package MyPlugin; use Moose; with 'Dist::Zilla::UtilRole::MaybeZilla'; ... sub foo { if ( $self->has_zilla ) { $self->zilla->whatever } else { $slightlymessyoption } } Additionally, it provides a few compatibility methods to make life easier, namely log_debug, log, log_fatal Which will invoke the right places in "dzil" if possible, but revert to a sensible default if not. INSTALLATION This is a Perl module distribution. It should be installed with whichever tool you use to manage your installation of Perl, e.g. any of cpanm . cpan . cpanp -i . Consult http://www.cpan.org/modules/INSTALL.html for further instruction. Should you wish to install this module manually, the procedure is perl Makefile.PL make make test make install COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE This software is copyright (c) 2017 by Kent Fredric . This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.