Apache Modules and Their Functions

18 Feb 2010

Article by Aashish

Apache Performance Modules

Apache is a powerful and widely-used World-Wide Web (Web) server. One of its strengths is that the modules that it is made of are customizable according to the user’s requirements. Ashish Kumar discusses the benefits and the process of customization, along with a brief introduction to some useful modules.

List of Standard Modules

This appendix (alphabetically) lists of all of the standard modules that are part of the current (version 1.3.x) Apache distribution. Table 1 the modules that are compiled-in by default and Table 2 lists the ones which are not.

MODULE	FUNCTION
mod_access	Host based access control
mod_actions	Filetype/method-based script execution
mod_alias	Aliases and redirects
mod_asis	The .asis file handler
mod_auth	User authentication using text files
mod_autoindex	Automatic directory listings
mod_cgi	Invoking CGI scripts
mod_dir	Basic directory handling
mod_env	Passing of environments to CGI scripts
mod_imap	The imagemap file handler
mod_include	Server-parsed documents
mod_isapi	Windows ISAPI extension support
mod_log_config	User-configurable logging
mod_mime	Determining document types using file extension
mod_negotiation	Content negotiation
mod_setenvif	Set environment variables based on client information
mod_status	Server status display
mod_userdir	User home directories
mod_unique_id	Generate unique request identifier for every request
mod_usertrack	User tracking using Cookies

Table 1. Apache Standard Modules Compiled-In by Default.

MODULE	FUNCTION
mod_auth_anon	Anonymous user authentication, FTP-style
mod_auth_db	User authentication using Berkeley DB files
mod_auth_dbm	User authentication using DBM files
mod_cern_meta	Support for HTTP header metafiles
mod_digest	MD5 authentication
mod_example	Demonstrates Apache API
mod_expires	Apply Expires: headers to resources
mod_headers	Add arbitrary HTTP headers to resources
mod_info	Server configuration information
mod_log_agent	Logging of user agents
mod_log_referer	Logging of document references
mod_mime_magic	Determining document types using “magic numbers”
mod_mmap_static	Mapping files into memory for faster serving
mod_proxy	Caching proxy abilities
mod_rewrite	Powerful URI-to-filename mapping using regular expressions
mod_so	Experimental support for loading modules (DLLs on Windows) at runtime (not compiled-in the UNIX distribution)
mod_speling	Automatically correct minor typos in URLs

Table 2. Apache Standard Modules Not Compiled-In by Default.

Appendix II : List of Nonstandard Modules

This appendix is a list of some nonstandard Apache modules. The selection is biased towards modules for programming language support and Web site administration. See Table 3.

MODULE	FUNCTION
apache_ssl	SSL extensions for Apache
mod_bandwidth	Limit bandwidth based on number of connections
mod_cint	Embedded C/C++ interpreter module for apache
Chili!ASP	Active Server Pages module
ColdFusion Module	Interface to the ColdFusion application server (Windows NT only)
Cookie Authentication	Fake Basic authentication using Cookies
dir_log_module	Implements per-directory logging
Distributed Permanence Control Apache Module	Module designed to work with RCS and CVS to encourage the permanence of document version/editions on the Web
FastCGI	Keeps CGI processes alive to avoid per-hit forks
GIF Counter	Basic GIF counter
Hotwired Mod_include	Hotwired extensions to mod_include
Indexer	Configurable directory listing module
Java Wrapper Module	Enables execution of Java applications as CGI directly
mod_allowdev	Restricts access to filespace more efficiently
mod_auth_ldap	Apache LDAP authentication module
mod_auth_mysql	mySQL authentication module
mod_auth_udp	External authentication using UDP
mod_cgisock	Socket implementation of the CGI
mod_format	Formats C, C++, and Java source code using HTML
mod_gunzip	On-the-fly decompression of HTML documents
mod_hosts_access	Allows you to use the hosts.allow and hosts.deny files to configure access to Apache
mod_javascript	JavaScript module (ECMA-262)
mod_jserv	Java servlet interface
mod_neoinclude	NeoWebScript – Tcl scripting extension
mod_perl	Embeds Perl language interpreter and provides a Perl interface to the server API
mod_ssl	Free Apache interface to SSLeay
mod_weborb	Directly invokes CORBA-objects to handle CGI requests
mod_auth_msql	Basic authentication with the mSQL database
parselog	Perl script to parse and store logs by server and date
PHP	Server-side scripting language with extensive database support
mod_pyapache	Embedded Python language interpreter
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