After building the server, it's a good idea to test it throughly by calling:

panic% make test

Fortunately, mod_perl comes with a big collection of tests, which attempt to exercise all the features you asked for at the configuration stage. If any of the tests fails, the make test step will fail.

Running make test will start the freshly built httpd on port 8529 (an unprivileged port), running under the UID (user ID) and GID (group ID) of the perl Makefile.PL process. The httpd will be terminated when the tests are finished.

To change the default port (8529) used for the tests, do this:

panic% perl Makefile.PL PORT=xxxx

Each file in the testing suite generally includes more than one test, but when you do the testing, the program will report only how many tests were passed and the total number of tests defined in the test file. To learn which ones failed, run the tests in verbose mode by using the TEST_VERBOSE parameter:

panic% make test TEST_VERBOSE=1

As of mod_perl v1.23, you can use the environment variables APACHE_USER and APACHE_GROUP to override the default User and Groupsettings in the httpd.conf file used for make test. These two variables should be set before the Makefile is created to take effect during the testing stage. For example, if you want to set them to httpd, you can do the following in the Bourne-style shell:

panic% export APACHE_USER=httpd
panic% export APACHE_GROUP=httpd
panic% perl Makefile.PL ...