.cgi with ModPerl

[Jeff]

Title: Message

I am setting up a server so that all my scripts have .cgi extentions.  It would be nice if I could just add some directives in the httpd.conf that will have all my virtual hosts use modPerl for any files with either a .pl or a .cgi extention.  The reason I prefer this method is that I have a couple scripts that I load in my httpdocs directory (the site home page is a script) So this is what I did:

 

Commented out: AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

 

Added the following:

 

<IfModule mod_perl.c>
   <Files ~ (\.pl|\.cgi)>
        SetHandler perl-script
        PerlHandler Apache::PerlRun

        Options +ExecCGI
        allow from all
        PerlSendHeader On
   </Files>
</IfModule>

 

What I found is that when I only had this code only outside of the VirtualHost configurations, my test script indicated .pl was running in modPerl but .cgi wasn't.  I only could get .cgi to run in mod_Perl by copying this code inside of each of the VirtualHost configurations.

 

Obviously I'm not an Apache config expert but one thing that also struck me strange is that while this code clearly indicates how to handle .pl and .cgi file extentions, prior to adding this, I could not find anywhere in httpd.conf where it maps .cgi files in this same way.  The only code I could find is AddHandler cgi-script .cgi but shouldn't there be some additional corresponding code like PerlHandler Appache::Mod_CGI, Options +ExecCGI, etc.??  Also, how does appache know which module to use for ScriptAlias directories?  I left the ScriptAlias directives in for the cgi-bin director and didn't change them to just Alias directives and it works fine but I guess that means a filematch directive overrides a ScriptAlias directive?

 

A bit confused.  Anyway, is the above method for achieving what I want an acceptable and secure/safe way to handle it?

 

Thanks