This is my first foray into writing Apache2 modules, and it is meant as both a learning exercise for me and an entertaining piece of open source software for the world at large. It is by no means optimized for high-availability environments and I make no guarantee that it is free of bugs or security flaws. Use at your own risk!
Anyone that's made heavy use of Linux has probably come across the fortune program at some point. It outputs "a random, hopefully interesting, adage" on demand, a sort of digital fortune cookie (hence the name).
It is a module for the Apache2 webserver that pipes the output of the fortune command into an environment variable. This results in each and every request to the webserver having available a different fortune that can be dumped into a header, accessed by a CGI script, or any other number of things.
I wrote this mostly for fun and because it's been a while since I dabbled in the C language.
There are multiple ways to compile and install an apache module. My preferred method is to use apxs:
# build shared object file
apxs -c mod_fortune.c
# and install it (may require root/sudo)
apxs -i -a mod_fortune.laThis should not only move the object file into place, but add a LoadModule directive into your apache configuration.
This software is released as open source under the MIT license
This is an example configuration that would insert an X-Fortune header to every successful request.
# if mod_header is enabled...
<IfModule mod_header.c>
# load and configure mod_fortune (default path but custom max length)
LoadModule fortune_module modules/mod_fortune.so
<IfModule mod_fortune.c>
FortuneMaxLength 1000
#FortuneProgram /usr/games/fortune
</IfModule>
# set X-Fortune header for successful response, if env variable exists
Header onsuccess set X-Fortune %{FORTUNE_COOKIE}e env=FORTUNE_COOKIE
</IfModule>