Hello, I'm working on an Apache configuration for a cluster of machines serving a variety of virtual hosts.
New virtual hosts are provisioned by a Web application, and all information needed to set up the virtual hosts is in a database table. I would like my Apache to set up the virtual hosts on the fly based on information in the tables. I have seen examples for generating the virtual hosts configuration from a database when Apache starts. That leaves me with the problem of how the unprivileged Web application doing the provisioning can reliably trigger a reload across an entire cluster, and also what to do if something goes wrong so I don't end up with a whole cluster of dead Web servers. It seems much cleaner to me to let Apache look up the information for a virtual host as it is needed. Conceptually, when each request comes in, I would like Apache to look at the Host: header, build a temporary virtual host entry from that, and use it to service the request. I will use caching to make it reasonably fast. Then the provisioning script just writes to the database table and is done, and I can handle any errors on a per-request basis without Apache failing to start. I see some hooks in PerlTransHandler and PerlMapToStorageHandler that seem like they can almost do what I want, but I don't see how to set other virtual host parameters, like ServerAdmin, UseCanonicalName, etc. I'm just starting to work on this, and I thought I would see if anybody had tried anything similar before and had some suggestions for what to do, or what not to do. Thanks! ----Scott.
