In a great example of convergence, I have been bumping into FastCGI
and Apache 2.x all over the place lately. I was able to beg Paul Querna (congrats on
being voted in as a member!) into giving me a module writing
tutorial at ApacheCon (where the previously mentioned
mod_wombat was born) specifically with the intention of
putting my money where my mouth is helping with Apache 2 and FastCGI
(or Zed Shaw's new SCGI module).
It turns out Paul has beaten me to the punch -- he and Garrett Rooney already have
work going on
mod_proxy_fcgi in httpd trunk. This should provide
remote fcgi instances, all the goodness from
mod_proxy_balancer, and places FastCGI in the core of
the web server instead of as a third party module! Awesome! It's
being worked on in the trunk, but I offered (the email is still in
my outbox as I am offline at the moment) to help maintain a 2.2
branch as I'd like to be able to use this Real Soon Now. Of course I
have no C or httpd credentials, but that is what patches are
for. Hopefully this can be made to work. I used to hack
C/C++... a decade ago =) Scrape the rust off and we'll see how it
goes.
Along the way I learned that Nick Kew had patched the
existing mod_fcgi to work against HTTPD 2.2. The catch
is there has been a lot of FUD about mod_fcgi and
Apache 2.x, but no one I know has been able to cite exactly what the
problem is, just a nebulous "there are issues."
So, big request, if you have had issues with mod_fcgi and Apache 2, please email me ( brianm@apache.org ) or the FastCGI Developers list and I promise to try and get things fixed even if I have to fix it myself (which would not be real-soon-now as my C is pretty derned tootin rusty, unfortunately, but it'd happen!) but I get the feeling a lot of the httpd hackers would like to lay this to rest =)
writebacks...
Time Frame, ETA?
Looks like Ruby on Rails has picked up on your article. http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2005/12/29/apache-gets-serious-about-fastcgi#comments Any idea as to when this will be merged and working in Apache so that Ruby on Rails can use it?
Well, mod_proxy_fcgi currently only has code for connecting to FastCGI over TCP, but we are planning on adding support for UnixD sockets, and we have started floating ideas on how to do the local process management on the development list. I assume you meant mod_fcgid, not mod_fcgi? It also seems odd to direct traffic to the FastCGI developers list, since it seems purely concerned with the orphaned mod_fastcgi... On timelines. It will be done when it is done. Both me and Garrett are doing this in our spare time, not for work..... But, I ive been testing it with my Django development. I wouldn't be surprised to have at least parts of our branch merged back into trunk within a month. No promises. If people want it sooner or better, patches are always welcome.
Yay
It's great to see this in action. I've been one of those people that have called FastCGI development on Apache a dead-end, and now I'm glad to see that I'm having to eat my words. Hurrah.
mod_fcgid lastest is 1.07 released November 10, 2005. See http://fastcgi.coremail.cn/index.htm Will the new development be based on mod_fcgi or mod_fcgid? And how was one module chosen over the other one? I recently switched from mod_fcgi to mod_fcgid and have been very happy except for it lacking a feature to make a specified number of processes immune to idle timeouts. timeout (autokill).
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