Trailing slash problem with mod

jest has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This seems like the sort of thing that would be covered in a dozen FAQs, but I can't seem to find it anywhere, and Googling has yielded nothing relevant.

I have an app running under mod_perl, with my own handler. The relevant block in my httpd.conf is:

<Location /foo>
     SetHandler perl-script
     PerlHandler FooModule
</Location>
[download]

When I go to this app at http://localhost/foo/, it works fine, likewise for anything under this, such as http://localhost/foo/action/?id=23, the path-parsing etc. being handled in my app. My only problem is that http://localhost/foo, without the trailing slash, goes nowhere; it doesn't even get to my app.

The only thing I want to do is have the slash-less URI go to the slash-ful URI; I want http://localhost/foo to reach http://localhost/foo/. I don't care about anything underneath, I'm picking that up fine. But I don't know how to do this. All the Alias-type directives seem intended to map URIs to filesystem locations, and I don't have a filesystem location, I have something dynamically generated by my handler.

What's the obvious thing I need to do here?

Thank you.

Comment on Trailing slash problem with mod_perl Select or Download Code

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Re: Trailing slash problem with mod_perl by Velaki (Chaplain) on Sep 28, 2004 at 16:06 UTC
This is less of a perl issue, and more of an Apache configuration issue, but one key question is: Which version of Apache are you running? If it's 2.0, then you might be able to modify your location directive as follows: `<Location /foo> DirectorySlash Off SetHandler perl-script PerlHandler FooModule </Location>` [download] This will turn off the mod_dir redirects, even though they should redirect from slashless to slashful (love that word) resources; however, it depends on other configuration directives. Also, ensure that ServerName has been set explicitly. Hope this helped, -v "Perl. There is no substitute."	[reply] [d/l]
•Re: Trailing slash problem with mod_perl by merlyn (Sage) on Sep 28, 2004 at 16:39 UTC
I explain how I handled this in my mod_perl Picture Handler column. If your handler gets a directory for a URI that doesn't end in slash, it must decline it unless it's prepared to handle the redirect that `mod_dir` normally does. In short: `use Apache::Constants qw(:common DIR_MAGIC_TYPE); ... sub handler { my $r = shift; return DECLINED if $r->content_type eq DIR_MAGIC_TYPE and not $r->uri =~ m{/$}; ... }` [download] If you don't want to handle directories at all, leave off the latter part of the check: just return DECLINED for anything that is DIR_MAGIC_TYPE. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Trailing slash problem with mod_perl by sgifford (Prior) on Sep 28, 2004 at 16:13 UTC
This is likely to be an Apache problem. You can probably fix it with a `RewriteRule` that simply adds a slash: `RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^/foo$ /foo/ [R]` [download] If there might be arguments after `foo`, adding something like this might work: `RewriteRule ^/foo[^/](.*)$ /foo/$1 [R]` [download] These aren't tested, but you get the idea.	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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Trailing slash problem with mod_perl