Hi, all. I'm sort of a mod-perl newbie. That is to say, I've used mod-perl plenty of times just as a way of speeding up CGIs using Apache::Registry, but I haven't hacked into the server with it yet.
At this point, however, I'm diving in. What I want to do is to set things up so that any .mp or .php file has a subroutine run first, to do my own home-rolled session stuff (I don't much like Apache::Session's say of doing it, sorry to the creators of it). In the past, of course, I'd simply require the session in the .mp file (I make mod_perl script .mp and mod_cgi scripts .cgi, so that I can link the other extension to the same name and test under both configurations, as well as developing under the .cgi extension because I roll a lot of my own modules and don't like having to restart Apache to recompile the modules I write). However, as the site I'm building now uses both PHP *and* Perl CGIs (under mod_perl in production), I want to do the session stuff outside rather than writing a PHP module to duplicate the Perl functionality or something. I figured the easiest thing to do would be to get the cookie, connect to the database, retrieve the sssion stuff, and then set environment variables based on the results, i.e., if the cookie is present, look up the session data in the session table, and set an environment variable for each session variable retrieved form the database (in simple form). Also to delete the cookie (reset it with an expiry of yesterday) if it's invalid (not matching an id in the session table, that is). Thereby all the sesion info is simple stored in environment variables. Now, looking at mod_perl, it *seems* this should be easy to implement. Except I can't figure out how to do it. PerlHandler doesn't seem to be what I want, because it will then not actually run the Perl or PHP script. Perl*Handlers are probably it somehow, except the documentation at http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/config.html#Perl_Handlers doesn't actually seem to bother saying WHAT all those Perl*Handlers are for (and if someone out there thinks that the names make them self-explanatory -- well -- that may be true to a C coder who deals with writing Apache modules all the time, but not for me.) <Perl> blocks aren't it either from what I can tell. I tried something as simple as setting $ENV{TEST_THINGY} = `date`; in a <Perl> block and it works fine when the server starts up, but it doesn't do it afterwards. It's always got that same date which shows me that <Perl> blocks aren't interpreted except that first time. ------------- Another thing I've found odd -- when I set environment variables from a <Perl> block with $ENV{WHATEVER} = 'some value' -- it works fine as long as I PassEnv it after. When I set them with SetEnv, it works fine. But when I set them with PerlSetEnv it's weird... it works fine in mod_perl, doesn't work under mod_cgi, and works under mod_php ONLY after a .mp script has been hit. I don't really get why this is. ------------- Anyway -- so yeah -- I wanted to do something that should be really simple -- check the database based on a cookie, if present, and delete the cookie if it's invalid, otherwise set several environment variables so that PHP and Perl knew the same things from the session, and then run whatever script was requested -- but it's turning out to be a headache and I'm having a LOT of trouble figuring out what order the documentation is supposed to be read in (not to mention continually annoyed that everyone who writes such documents doesn't seem to understand that some people -- like me -- HATE the concept of ScriptAliases, and so seeing everything written as if this is the way it's normally done is a bit irritating). -- Dodger P.S. As a note: I can't afford to buy a book right now. I'm in Portland and the dot-com-crash is not over here. I'm getting booted from my apartment because I don't have the exorbitant suburban rent, and I live on Ramen. Please don't tell me to go buy the Eagle Book. The answers I seek should be somewhere other than a book. -- Report problems: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html List etiquette: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/email-etiquette.html
