So I just recently finished reading Restful Web Services and decided I wanted to go back and play with Catalyst and REST some. The original way to create a Catalyst skeleton is to run catalyst.pl. This creates a lot of nice files to get you started. dzil new basically does the same thing for a generic cpan module. Honestly, without any plugins dzil new isn’t that useful. However, once you add Git::Init , you remove several steps from the creation of a new module and repository.