Re: [Hampshire] mod_perl, PerlSetVar and startup scripts

Hi Graham,

On Sat, Nov 17, 2007 at 06:34:44PM +0000, Graham Bleach wrote:
> On 17/11/2007, Andy Smith <andy@???> wrote:
> > I'm attempting to write a mod_perl (registry) application and would
> > like to parse a config file once per (web) server startup. I want
> > to avoid hard coding the path to the config file in the startup
> > script.
>
> The most promising reference I can find is [1]. In the
> PerlPostConfigHandler section it states:
>
> "You can do the same in the startup file, but in the post_config phase
> you have an access to a complete configuration tree (via
> Apache2::Directive)."

> [1] http://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/user/handlers/server.html

I couldn't get this to work for me; yes I could access the full
server config, but only as a massive hash where I would need to
iterate over the various VirtualHost names to find the bits I
wanted.. and that would mean hardcoding in the VirtualHost name. :)

I may simply have been misunderstanding it however.

In the meantime one of the devs at $dayjob suggested the following:

httpd.conf:
        <Virtualhost ...>

        ...

                <Perl>
                        use Foo::Bar;
                        Foo::Bar::loadConfig('/path/to/config');
                </Perl>

        ...

        </VirtualHost>

Foo/Bar.pm:
        package Foo::Bar;

        {       
                my $closure;

                sub loadConfigFrom {
                        $closure = WhateverYouParseConfigWith->new(-file => shift);
                }

                sub getConfig {
                        return $closure;
                }
        }

        1;

Then elsewhere in my code I can do:

        my $conf = Foo::Bar::getConfig;

safe in the knowledge that it is just shuffling memory around rather
than opening and parsing files with every hit..

Also I forgot that I would need:

        PerlOptions +Parent

in each vhost as otherwise each vhost is going to share the same
perl interpreter and thus symbol table.. that really confused me for
a bit!

Cheers,
Andy