Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Access to Configuration and Request Information

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 get access to 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 always 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.