Today I installed mod_perl for the first time and ran into a few roadblocks. Nothing terribly hard to figure out, but it took some searching to get everything I needed. I thought I would share a very short tutorial on how to get it up and running quickly and hopefully prevent someone else from having to do the same detective work.

This is what I had to do with ActivePerl 5.10.1.1007 and Apache 2.2.11:

1. Install mod_perl from the ActivePerl PPM. It is not available on the ActiveState repository (by default you only have that one), so you will need to add the University of Winnipeg 5.10 repository.
2. If you used the command line PPM to install mod_perl, it prompted you to install the Apache module you need to accompany the Perl module. If you install it using the Windows PPM, it won’t prompt you and just skip that. You have to download mod_perl.so and place it in your /apache/modules/ directory.
3. Last think you will have to do is configure Apache’s httpd.conf file. The article Configuring mod_perl 2.0 for Win32 gives very good instructions for doing so. This will guide you through adding the LoadModule line and configuring what directories you want to have files be handled by Perl.

Once you complete the above, just restart Apache and you are good to go!