The first step is to obtain the source code distributions of Apache and mod_perl. These distributions can be retrieved from http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/ and http://perl.apache.org/dist/ and are also available from mirror sites. Even if you have the Apache server running on your machine, you'll need its source distribution to rebuild it from scratch with mod_perl.

The source distributions of Apache and mod_perl should be downloaded into a directory of your choice. For the sake of consistency, we assume throughout the book that all builds are being done in the /home/stas/src directory. Just remember to substitute /home/stas/src in the examples with the actual path being used.

The next step is to move to the directory containing the source archives:

panic% cd /home/stas/src

Uncompress and untar both sources. GNU tar allows this using a single command per file:

panic% tar -zvxf apache_1.3.xx.tar.gz
panic% tar -zvxf mod_perl-1.xx.tar.gz

For non-GNU tars, you may need to do this with two steps (which you can combine via a pipe):

panic% gzip -dc apache_1.3.xx.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
panic% gzip -dc mod_perl-1.xx.tar.gz | tar -xvf -

Linux distributions supply tar and gzip and install them by default. If your machine doesn't have these utilities already installed, you can get tar and gzip from http://www.gnu.org/, among other sources. The GNU versions are available for every platform that Apache supports.