Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

A.9. The Apache::Status Class

The Apache::Status class provides dynamic status and debug information about the mod_perl interpreter. When installed, it will display symbol table dumps, inheritance trees, lists of global variables, and other displays that may be of interest to Perl module developers (Figure 1.1).

Figure A.1. The Apache::Status module produces detailed reports on the state of mod_perl.

A URI to run Apache::Status must be installed before the module can be used. To do this, create an entry like the following in one of the Apache configuration files:

<Location /perl-status>
   SetHandler  perl-script
   PerlHandler Apache::Status
</Location>

After restarting the server, requests for the URI /perl-status will display a series of pages showing the status of various Apache modules, including your own.

Apache::Status requires the Devel::Symdump module to run at all. This is not a standard part of the Perl distribution and will need to be downloaded from CPAN and installed. Certain other features of the module are not activated unless you also install a few third party pieces. With the Data::Dumper module installed and StatusDumper set to On, it is possible to view the contents of global variables. Installing Apache::Peek and setting StatusPeek to On enables inspection of symbols the same way Perl views them internally. If mod_perl was compiled with Perl 5.005 or higher and ...