There are situations when you need to install mod_perl-enabled Apache and other components (such as Perl libraries) into nonstandard locations. For example, you might work on a system to which you don't have root access, or you might need to install more than one set of mod_perl-enabled Apache and Perl modules on the same machine (usually when a few developers are using the same server and want to have their setups isolated from each other, or when you want to test a few different setups on the same machine).

We have already seen that you can install mod_perl-enabled Apache into different directories on the system (using the APACHE_PREFIX parameter of Makefile.PL). Until now, all our scenarios have installed the Perl files that are part of the mod_perl package into the same directory as the system Perl files (usually /usr/lib/perl5).

Now we are going to show how can you install both the Apache and the Perl files into a nonstandard directory. We'll show a complete installation example using stas as a username, assuming that /home/stas is the home directory of that user.