Webmaster in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition By Robert Eckstein, Stephen Spainhour
Table of Contents
Part VIII: Server Configuration
Modules are a key part of Apache. They provide much of the functionality administrators expect in a modern web server, including user tracking, CGI scripting, authentication, SSL, etc. The set of modules distributed with Apache can be divided into a number of groups. Core modules provide the set of directives that are always available to Apache. The Base modules provide a common set of features for the server and are compiled in by default. You have to manually deselect them during compilation to not install them. The Extension modules comprise another set of common and useful server features, but are not required for every server setup. Therefore, they are not compiled by default. The remaining modules are classified as Experimental; they are either not completed to specification, or introduce instability to some environments.
This chapter contains information about the Base and Extension modules and their directives. The modules are present in versions 1.3 and 2.0, and differences in support are noted per version. Table 19-1 shows the Apache modules described in this chapter.
Table 19-1. Standard Apache modules
Module
Compiled
Description
mod_access
Access control
mod_actions
CGI scripting
mod_alias
Aliasing and filesystem mapping
mod_asis
Provides for .asis (as is) files
mod_auth
User authentication
mod_auth_anon
Anonymous user authentication
mod_auth_db
User authentication with DB files. (Apache 1.1 to 1.3)
mod_auth_dbm
User authentication with DBM files
mod_autoindex
Automatic directory listings
mod_cern_meta
Support for CERN metafiles
mod_cgi
Execution of CGI scripts
mod_cgid
Execution of CGI scripts with external daemon (Apache 2.0 and up)
mod_dir
Simple directory handling
mod_dav
Support for WevDAV (Apache 2.0 and up)
mod_deflate
Compress content sent to the client (Apache 2.0 and up)
mod_env
Environment variable handling
mod_example
Example of Apache API usage
mod_expires
Automatic expire headers
mod_headers
Modification of HTTP response headers
mod_imap
Image map handling
mod_include
Server-side includes
mod_info
Server information
mod_isapi
Support for ISAPI extensions in Windows
mod_log_config
Configurable logging
mod_logio
Logs input and output bytes (Apache 2.0 and up)
mod_mime
MIME handling
mod_mime_magic
MIME handling via magic numbers
mod_negotiation
Content negotiation
mod_proxy
Proxy capabilities
mod_rewrite
URL rewriting
mod_setenvif
Conditional setting of environment variables
mod_so
Dynamic loading of modules and libraries
mod_speling
Spelling corrections
mod_ssl
Secure transaction over SSL (Apache 2.0 and up)
mod_status
Server status pages
mod_suexec
Select user and group for CGI (Apache 2.0 and up)
mod_userdir
User HTML directories
mod_unique_id
Unique server request identifiers
mod_usertrack
User tracking (cookies)
mod_vhost_alias
Dynamic virtual host configuration (Apache 2.0 and up)
This chapter presents an overview of the runtime directives used with the Apache modules. Each of the directives listed in this chapter are grouped in association with the module they relate to.