In this issue

Version 1.0.3 is the current public release. The next version will be 1.1, initially as a beta release (1.1b1), and possibly in April.

Just a couple fixed this week... Apache wasn't escaping double quotes (") in URLs, and there was a bug returning URLs in mod_imap when the URL was a scheme other than http (such as gopher URLs). Both will be fixed in 1.1.

A whole bunch of new things this week, some from the Apache core team and some offered as contributions from others. Here's a list of the major developments...

Cleaning out the magic types

In the current version of Apache, special types of files, such as CGI scripts and parsed-HTML files, are identified by using special 'magic' MIME types. For instance, cgi scripts have the MIME type 'application/x-httpd-cgi'. Version 1.1 will clean this up by removing these magic types and instead use a new directive, AddHandler, to control the processing of special files. This should be less confusing that the current situation, and will mean that files can be given extensions to specify both an action to be applied to it (such as being processed for server-side-includes) and a MIME type to return it as. (compare that with the current situation, where, for example, SSI files are always returned as HTML).

Statistics Module

The statistics module will report on usage of Apache, giving totals of bytes and files served. It will also show the current state of the child processes, URLs currently being processed, and overall server load.

Forcing MIME types

At present, the MIME type of a file (that is, the information that tells the browser how to display the file) is set by its extension. A new option will force all files in a particular directory to be served as a specific MIME type irrespective of their extensions.

Server Side Includes enhanced

A contributed enhancement to the current mod_include (which does server-side-includes, or SSIs) has a number of feature enhancements: conditional inclusion, variables and regular expression matching.

ErrorDocuments anywhere

The ErrorDocument directive in srm.conf lets you give back a customised file (or even a cgi) where the request causes a error, such as file not found. In 1.1 you should be able to put ErrorDocument directives in .htaccess files.

Postgres Authentication

The existing mod_auth_msql module authenticates users against a mini SQL server. A new contributed module does the same thing for users of Postgres.

Work on full URI and Hosts from HTTP/1.1

The new spec for HTTP, version 1.1, is still being developed. One of the areas planned for enhancement over the current version is allowing virtual hosts to work without the hassle of using dummy IP addresses. This makes use of either full-URI requests, where the request contains the hostname that the request is directed at, and/or the Host: request header. Work is now underway supporting these enhancements. Version 1.1 of Apache will not claim to be HTTP/1.1 compliant, but these new features will take it in the right direction.

Faster perl CGI?

Starting a perl CGI script from Apache (and other servers) can be a lot slower than starting compiled programs, such as those written in C. This is because the perl interpreter itself has to be loaded and run. But perl is (usually) easier and quicker to write than C, so it is popular. Now a contributor has been working on a module that incorporates a full perl interpreter! This will make perl scripts many times faster to run.

Name that user

There's been some discussion about how or if Apache should set the user it is running as when it executes scripts. In some situations, it would be useful if Apache could run a script as the owner of the script, rather than as the www server user or nobody. This could be built into Apache, but there are security concerns. At the moment, a useful external wrapper to do this is available in cgiwrap.