We assume, to begin with, that you are running on some sort of Unix machine, you have downloaded the Apache sources, built Apache, and that now you are going to add mod_perl.
The first thing to do is to get the mod_perl sources. Go to http://apache.org. In the list of links to the left of the screen you should see “mod_perl”: select it. This takes you to http://perl.apache.org, the home page of the Apache/Perl Integration Project.
The first step is to select “Download,” which then offers you a number of ways of getting to the executables. The simplest is to download from http://perl.apache.org/dist (linked as this site), but there are many alternatives. When we did it, the gzipped tar on offer was mod_perl-1.24.tar.gz — no doubt the numbers will have moved on by the time this is in print. This gives you about 600 KB of file that you get onto your Unix machine as best you can.
It is worth saving it in a directory near your Apache, because this
slightly simplifies the business of building and installing it later
on. We keep all this stuff in /usr/src/mod_perl, near where the
Apache sources were already stored. We created a directory for
mod_perl, moved the downloaded file into it,
unzipped it with gunzip <filename>, and
extracted the files with tar xvf <filename>
so we have: /usr/src/apache/mod_perl/mod_perl-1.24,
and not very far away:
/usr/src/apache/apache_1.3.26.
Go into /usr/src/apache/mod_perl/mod_perl-1.24, and read INSTALL. The simple way of installing the package offers no surprises:
perl Makefile.PL make make test make install
For some reason, we found we had to repeat the whole process two or three times before it all went smoothly without error messages. So if you get obscure complaints, go back to the top and try again before beginning to scream.
Some clever things happen, culminating in a recompile of Apache. This works because the mod_perl makefile looks for the most recent Apache source in a neighboring directory. If you want to take this route, make sure that the right version is in the right place. If the installation process cannot find an Apache source directory, it will ask you where to look. This process generates a new httpd in /usr/src/apache/apache_1.3.26/src, which needs to be copied to wherever you keep your executables — in our case, /usr/local/bin.
To make experimentation easier, you might not want to overwrite the old, non-mod_perl httpd, so save the new one as httpd.perl. The change of size is striking: up from 480 KB to 1.2 MB. Luckily, we will only have to load it once when Apache starts up.
In The mod_perl Guide, Bekman gives five different recipes for installing mod_perl.
The first is a variant on the method we gave earlier, with the difference that various makefile parameters allow you to control the operation more precisely:
perl Makefile.PL APACHE_SRC=../../apache_x.x.x/src DO_HTTPD=1 EVERYTHING=1
The xs represent numbers that describe your source
for Apache. DO_HTTPD=1 creates a new Apache
executable, and EVERYTHING=1 turns all the other
parameters on. For a complete list and their applications, see the
documentation. This seems to have much the same effect as simply
running:
perl Makefile.PL
If you want to use the one-step, predigested method of creating APACHE using the APACI, you can do that with this:
perl Makefile.PL APACHE_SRC=../../apache_x.x.x/src DO_HTTPD=1 \ EVERYTHING=1 USE_APACI=1
Note that you must use \ to continue lines.
Two more recipes concern DSOs (Dynamic Shared Objects), that is, executables that Apache can load when needed and unload when not. We don’t suggest that you use these for serious business, firstly because we are not keen on DSOs, and secondly because mod_perl is not a module you want to load and unload. If you use it at all, you are very likely to need it all the time.