Apache mod_macro Simulator

This is a simple Perl script to approximate the expanded Apache configuration which will be generated by the Apache mod_macro module, which is a built-in module in Apache 2.4 and later and available as a third-party module for earlier versions.

The original use case was to check that macros result in the same configuration after being introduced into existing files, or restructured.

There is no guarantee that the output will be identical to that produced by the actual module, so caution should be taken if using this for debugging.

Usage

Pass one or more Apache config files as command-line arguments or on standard input

perl parse_macros.pl /path/to/file.conf
perl parse_macros.pl /path/to/file.conf /path/to/another-file.conf
ssh someserver.example.com cat /remote/file.conf | perl parse_macros.pl

Operation

The script actually parses the config in two phases:

1. The configuration is transformed by regex into a Perl script where every <Macro> block is a sub-routine, and every Use statement invokes the appropriate sub-routine.
2. The generated Perl is then run through eval, which prints the expanded Apache configuration to standard output.

Includes

There is no direct support for the Include directive, so including a file based on a macro parameter cannot be simulated.

However, there is an accompanying utility to pre-process a file with Includes outside of Macros. This also handles simple relative paths like ./foo and ../foo for portability of testing.

For example, you can create a pipeline like this to test a file which combines Include and macro definitions:

perl parse_includes.pl path/to/sample/config.conf | perl parse_macros.pl | perl strip_comments.pl