apache2filter

[Joe Orton]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 07:43:02PM -0400, Marc Richards wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> I saw in the release notes for RHEL 4 that they have switched from 
> apache2filter to apache2handler for processing PHP files.  I just 
> checked my copy of FC2 and noticed that apache2handler was being used as 
> well.  I have couple questions:
> 
> 1) Will FC4 be using handler or the filter?

The handler.

> 2) Does anybody know why the switch was made from handler to filter for 
> RHEL3 -> RHEL4 (and presumably RH9/FC1 -> FC2)?
> 
> Using the filter (on RHEL3) allows me to easily include PHP output in my 
> regular html page by turning on the IncludesNoExec directive. 
> IncludesNoExec doesn't work using the handler because it only works with 
> text/* file types and in order to associate php files with the handler 
> you have to use AddType application/x-httpd-php .php.  Using the 
> Includes (no NoExec) directive is bad because it lets web developers 
> execute command line programs from within .html pages.

The filter was really a design mismatch.  The interface to the parsing
engine (Zend) in PHP is the file: you can't parse arbitrary content from
buffers in memory, only stuff in a file.  The filter code is
unnecessarily complex and fragile because of this.

You don't have to use AddType to use the handler module, no; in fact,
for FC4 we switched to using this configuration:

AddHandler php5-script .php
AddType text/html .php

you just have to set php5-script as the handler for the content using
AddHandler or SetHandler as appropriate.

Regards,

joe