Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

7.1. The Child Initialization and Exit Phases

Apache provides hooks into the child process initialization and exit handling. The child process initialization handler, installed with PerlChildInitHandler, is called just after the main server forks off a child but before the child has processed any incoming requests. The child exit handler, installed with PerlChildExitHandler, is called just before the child process is destroyed.

You might need to install handlers for these phases in order to perform some sort of module initialization that won't survive a fork. For example, the Apache::DBI module has a child init handler that initializes a cache of per-child database connections, and the Apache::Resource module steps in during this phase to set up resource limits on the child processes. The latter is configured in this way:

PerlChildInitHandler Apache::Resource

Like other handlers, you can install a child init handler programmatically using Apache::push_handlers( ) . However, because the child init phase comes so early, the only practical place to do this is from within the parent process, in either a Perl startup file configured with a PerlModule or PerlRequire directive. For example, here's how to install an anonymous subroutine that will execute during child initialization to choose a truly random seed value for Perl's random number generator (using the Math::TrulyRandom module):

use Math::TrulyRandom (); Apache->push_handlers(PerlChildInitHandler => sub { srand Math::TrulyRandom::truly_random_value(); ...