Paul's Journal

The module formally known as mod_wombat was renamed mod_lua, and has pulled into the Apache HTTP Server trunk, and will be part of the future 2.4 stable release.

For an example of why it is cool, lets look at replacing a common task with mod_rewrite: Blocking Image Theft.

The HTTPD wiki even has an example of how to do this for us:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !=""
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ - [F,NC]

With the new mod_lua, you can do this using real if statements and functions.

For example:

<LuaHookTranslateName imagetheft>
function is_image(path)
    -- You could put complicated regular expressions here.
    if path:match("%a+.png") then
        return true
    end
    return false
end

function imagetheft(r)
    if not is_image(r.uri) then
        return apache2.DECLINED
    end

    referer = r:headers_in("Referer")
    if referer then
        if referer:find('example.com') then
            return apache2.DECLINED
        else
            r:err("Forbidden for Image Theft! uri=".. r.uri)
            return 403
        end
    end
    return apache2.DECLINED
end
</LuaHookTranslateName>

While this example comes out signifigantly longer, I do believe in the long run it will let people write more maintainable configurations, espcially for things like complicated RewriteRules — since basic things that have long be obsecured into RewriteCond can now be easily accessed and evaluated with an If statement in Lua.

Much of the API is still in flux, but hopefully we will come up with some shortcut builtins that make many common taskes easier and shorter.

After using Rhino for server side javascript at work, I can say I somewhat like server side javascript.  Others like Steve were already convinced a long time ago.

However, I don’t really like being tied into the whole Java world because of it.

When Google released their v8 Javascript Engine earlier this year, I always wanted to build an Apache Module for it.

This afternoon I had some time, and so I created mod_v8.

It doesn’t do much beyond a Hello World right now, but it is as simple as this:

ap.write("Hello World!");

I’m not sure if I will spend time making it a proper project, I really want to spend more time on making httpd 2.4 before getting too distracted with shiny things….