Installing and Configuring

While we aim to make the AxKit installation as simple as possible, there are many configuration options that allow you to customize your installation. So in this section we aim to get you started as quickly as possible. This section assumes you already have mod_perl and Apache installed and working. See the Chapter X if this is not the case. This section does not cover installing AxKit on Win32 systems, for which there is an ActiveState package at <URL>.

First download the latest version of AxKit, which you can get either from your local CPAN archive, or from the AxKit download directory at http://axkit.org/. Then type the following:

% gunzip -c AxKit-x.xx.tar.gz | tar xvf -
% cd AxKit-x.xx.tar.gz
% perl Makefile.PL
% make
% su
% make test install

If perl Makefile.PL warns about missing modules, notably XML::XPath, make a note of the missing modules and install them from the CPAN. AxKit will run without the missing modules, but without XML::XPath it will be impossible to run the examples below [F]2[/F].

Now we need to add some simple options to the very end of our httpd.conf file:

PerlModule AxKit
AddHandler axkit .xml
AddHandler axkit .xsp
AddHandler axkit .dkb
AxDebugLevel 10
PerlSetVar AxXPSInterpolate 1

Note that the first line: PerlModule AxKit must occur in your httpd.conf outside of any runtime configuration blocks, otherwise Apache cannot see the AxKit configuration directives and you will get errors when you try and start the httpd.

Now if you have XML::XPath installed (try perl -MXML::XPath -e0 on the command line to check), (re)start your Apache server. You are now ready to begin publishing transformed XML with AxKit!