Issues in using 3rd party libraries while developing Apache Modules

Question

Hello everyone!

I am writing an Apache module for my internship. I am using C for this (I am not acquainted with Perl or Python that much).

I need to use an HTML Parser to solve the problem for which I am writing this module. I am considering libxml2 for this purpose.

I am confused how should I link the library in my module ? Should I link the library while compiling the module OR Should I use the LoadFile directive in the configuration file to load the library.

My main concern is that while I am developing this on Ubuntu, but I don't know what will be the OS running on the deployment server. So I want its deployment, complications free and successful.

EDIT: @Grim: thanks for replying :)

I compiled the module with the following commands:

apxs -I /usr/include/libxml2/ -c mod_xmltest.c

sudo apxs -n xmltest_module -i mod_xmltest.la

I believe this does not link the libraries in the module, I was getting "Unresolved Symbols" error when starting the server, so I used the LoadFile directive to load libxml2 library. It seems to work.

Do you think there can be any issues this way? I think this makes my module more portable, as on the deployment server the admin can explicitly specify the location of the libxml2 library.

Answer 1

You should link the library while compiling your module.

There are of course the usual portability issues (at least then it comes to a non-posix OS). In this case some of them are solved by apxc. It's impossible to say which complications that might occur, but nothing of what you describe should cause any.