Install Apache Mod_Substitute

I came across interesting module for apache which does automatic search and replacement operations using regular expressions and decided to experiment on it. For information about this module documented in apache website

NOTE: This module is only available in Apache 2.2.7 and later

I was running Centos 5 and unable to load this module in httpd. Here is how i did it. The mod_substitute.so does not come preinstalled under modules so you have to copy the source of mod_substitute.c from the latest apache source and then compile it with apxs installer.

Yum install httpd httpd-devel php

Download the latest apache source tarball from httpd.apache.org. you need not compile it as httpd has already been installed with yum.


tar zxf httpd-2.2.9.tar.gz
cd modules/filters
cp mod_substitute.c /opt


then compile and install with apxs

apxs -cia mod_substitute.c

then open /etc/conf/httpd.conf and add a line like this…

LoadModule substitute_module modules/mod_substitute.so

This this is done, you have to setup mod_subsitute to do the filtering.

In .htaccess add lines like

AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
Substitute s/foo/bar/ni

or in httpd.conf
AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
Substitute s/foo/bar/ni


Once this is done it replaces all foo with bar in html pages.