All this sounds
horribly complicated, and, to be honest, it
is. But unless you plan to mess around with the guts of Apache (which
this book does not encourage you to do), all you really need to know
is that these structures exist and that your module can access them
at the appropriate moments. Each function exported by a module gets
access to the appropriate structure to enable it to function. The
appropriate structure depends on the function, of course, but it is
typically either a server_rec, the
module’s per-directory configuration structure (or
two), or a request_rec. As we saw earlier, if you
have a server_rec
, you can get access to your
per-server configuration, and if you have a
request_rec, you can get access to both your
per-server and your per-directory configurations.