We want to set our Apache web server so that it would answer with an HTML page containing a few information on the actual received request, and we want it to give this feedback only when we ask for "hello" on it.
Request-module connection
Apache should know about how to associate a user request to the handler that our module is designed to manage. To do that we add a Location directive in the Apache httpd configuration file.
You'll find this file in the Apache conf directory, named httpd.conf, we open it and we add this section:
<Location /hello>
SetHandler hello
</Location>
We ask Apache to set the handler "hello" so that it is invoked when is issued a request to the hello page directly under the root of my server.Secondly, we change the C source code, so that we check the passed request, and we ensure the passed handler matches our expectation:
// ...
static const char* MOD_HANDLER = "hello"; // 1
static int handler(request_rec* r)
{
if(r->handler == NULL || strcmp(r->handler, MOD_HANDLER)) // 2
{
// ...
return DECLINED; // 3
}
// ...
return OK; // 4
}
1. The handler for this module, it's value is used in httpd.conf, as shown above.2. Check the handler as passed by Apache.
3. If our module has nothing to say here we return DECLINED, to let know to Apache that it has to look elsewhere.
4. Otherwise, after we did our job, we return OK, saying in this way that Apache could considered the request accomplished.
Apache logging
It is often a good idea to log what is going on in our code, both for debugging and administrative purpose. In this module, it would be nice to have a feedback also when a request is discarded. We get this effect adding this line before "return DECLINED":
ap_log_rerror(APLOG_MARK, APLOG_DEBUG, 0, r, "handling declined: %s", r->handler);The Apache ap_log_rerror() lets us writing to the Apache error log file, you'll find it in the logs folder, in your Apache httpd installation directory, named "error_log".
APLOG_MARK is just a way to combine the standard __FILE__ and __LINE__ defines in a single symbol, to save a few keystrokes.
After it, we specify the log level, that ranges from APLOG_EMERG down to APLOG_DEBUG (not to mention the TRACE defines, not commonly used, as far as I know). In the httpd.conf file we configure which level of logging we actually want to print to the log file, setting the log level:
LogLevel debugAs you can imagine, in production it is usually a smart move to set the configured log level higher than debug.
Next parameter, here set to 0, is not very interesting here, and it is followed by the pointer to the request, as we get it from Apache.
Finally we have a string, representing what we want to log, and that could include printf-style parameters.
Building a HTML response
Admittedly, an Apache module is not the most programmer-friendly tool to create a HTML page. But it still make sense in such a simple case:
ap_set_content_type(r, "text/html"); // 1
ap_rputs("<html><head><title>Hello Module</title></head><body>", r); // 2
ap_rprintf(r, "handler: %s<br />\n", r->handler); // 3
ap_rprintf(r, "filename: %s<br />\n", r->filename);
ap_rprintf(r, "the_request: %s<br />\n", r->the_request);
ap_rprintf(r, "header_only: %d<br />\n", r->header_only);
ap_rprintf(r, "hostname: %s<br />\n", r->hostname);
ap_rputs("</body></html>", r);
1. Firstly, set the reply content type.2. To put a static string, as this one, ap_rputs() does an excellent job.
3. When we need to send parametrized stuff, we'd better using ap_rprintf().
As you can see, I generated the answer from the request, extracting a few (more or less) interesting values as received from Apache.
The complete C code for this module is on github. To compile it and add the generated .so to the server, you can use the apxs utility (more details in the previous post). Remember to set the Apache configuration file with the Location/SetHandler directives.
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