Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

2.4. "Hello World" with the Perl API

Now that you have mod_perl installed, it's time to put the Perl API through its paces.

First you'll need to create a location for your Apache Perl modules to live. If you haven't done so already, create a directory in some convenient place. We suggest creating a lib subdirectory within the server root, and a perl directory within that, making the full location ~www/lib/perl (Unix), or C:\Apache\lib\perl (Win32). Within this directory, create yet another directory for modules that live in the Apache:: namespace (which will be the vast majority of the modules we write), namely ~www/lib/perl/Apache.

You'll now have to tell Apache where to look for these modules. mod_perl uses the same include path mechanism to find required modules that Perl does, and you can modify the default path either by setting the environment variable PERL5LIB to a colon-delimited list of directories to search before Apache starts up or by calling use lib '/path/to/look/in' when the interpreter is first launched. The first technique is most convenient to use in conjunction with the PerlSetEnv directive, which sets an environment variable. Place this directive somewhere early in your server configuration file:

PerlSetEnv PERL5LIB /my/lib/perl:/other/lib/perl

Unfortunately this adds a little overhead to each request. Instead, we recommend creating a Perl startup file that runs the use lib statement. You can configure mod_perl to invoke a startup file of common Perl ...