AxKit - FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions about AxKit Upon startup of Apache I get the error: "Can't locate loadable object for module Apache::Log in @INC" AxKit uses Apache::Log for its logging in some places. This gives us some extra flexibility. However it is not built into mod_perl by default - you need to compile it in explicitly. The simplest way to do this is to just compile all the extra bits of mod_perl:

# in the modperl directory
perl Makefile.PL EVERYTHING=1
make
make test install

See also the various INSTALL documents that ship with mod_perl, and also the mod_perl guide. I install AxKit and Apache segfaults when it starts The usual cause is currently a conflict between differing versions of expat that are being loaded at the same time. The problem is too deep to go into in a simple FAQ (although I'll try and find a link to an explanation in a future version of this FAQ). Basically the current work around is to remove expat from your Apache (it is built in by default, and is used for mod_dav), and to be careful with PHP, which can also cause these sorts of conflicts. As a developer I respect that neither of these are particularly great long term work arounds, and I'm trying to bring the community of developers together to solve this problem permanently. First of all, to find out if this is your problem, execute the command:

strings /path/to/apache/bin/httpd | grep -i
        XML

. If there are any results at all then you are going to see these segfaults until you recompile Apache (and probably mod_perl too) To compile Apache without expat, simply supply the option:

RULE_EXPAT=NO

to ./configure when you build Apache. Alternatively if you build Apache with mod_perl (with mod_perl's DO_HTTPD option) it will supply this option automatically for you. See also the AxKit INSTALL file for a recipe for building Apache and mod_perl together that works. If none of this helps, then you may be having platform difficulties with the custom configuration directives that AxKit creates. Hopefully all of these have been solved already, but there may be some conflicts with PHP with these. If you absolutely can't do without PHP then you'll need to completely remove AxKit and all the binary components from your perl lib directory (check using "perl -V" on the command line) by hand (sorry, but there is no "make uninstall" command). Then re-compile AxKit using the following:

perl Makefile.PL NO_DIRECTIVES=1
make
make test install

Then start Apache, and hopefully this will fix the problem. We hope that a later version of mod_perl may not require this hack. When AxKit is installed with the NO_DIRECTIVES option, all configuration is done via PerlSetVar. Please contact the AxKit-users mailing list if you need to use this option so that we can provide more documentation where needed. Which Processor? AxKit ships out of the box with two processors for using XSLT, and several other stylesheet language modules. The choice between XML::XSLT and XML::Sablotron should generally be based on whether or not XML::Sablotron works on your platform, since it is a more complete implementation of XSLT and is faster than XML::XSLT (which is a pure perl implementation). Sablotron is known to work on Linux and Solaris, and other platforms are coming online all the time. Bizarre copy of ARRAY in aassign (sic) This is actually a bug in Perl 5.6. See this post to perl5-porters for a patch. Can I run AxKit on Windows? Yes, although it is not considered a primary platform, so you are mostly on your own with this. You can install it via ActiveState's PPM as follows:

ppm install 
 http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppmpackages/mod_perl-1.25_1.3.17-axkit.ppd

Note that will install mod_perl too. You can install it without mod_perl using the AxKit.ppd package at the same location. If you have further questions, please contact the AxKit Users mailing list. AxKit fails on looking up stylesheets If you get an error message in your log with "OK" in it, this may be caused by having CGI::Carp, or some other module that installs a $SIG{__DIE__} handler in a broken manner. Make sure you don't have CGI::Carp in your startup.pl or any other place. AxKit on Debian AxKit has "problems" detecting iconv (and probably libxml2) on Debian. We're not sure what is causing this yet, so in order to get around these problems you will need to edit the Makefile.PL files (in the root directory, and in lib/Apache/AxKit/) to comment out the checks for these libraries and just enforce their usage regardless. Sorry for the inconvenience - we're working on it, and would be interested in patches.