Notes about the Lua/APR binding

APR documentation

The online API documentation for APR has been my most useful resource while working on the Lua/APR binding but it leaves something to be desired when you’re looking for a high level overview. The following online resources help in this regard:

• God’s gift to C is an introductory article to the functionality of APR by The Register.
• The libapr tutorial by Inoue Seiichiro is a useful starting point for writing code.

Building APR on Windows

Building APR on Windows can be a pain in the ass. It is meant to be done with Microsoft tools but fortunately these are freely available. Here are some notes I made in the process:

1. Install Microsoft Visual C++ Express. You only need the command line tools, the GUI isn’t needed.

2. Install the Microsoft Platform SDK. The full SDK is over 1 GB but you only need the following:

   • Microsoft Windows Core SDK
     • Build environment (x86 32-bit)
   • Microsoft Web Workshop (IE) SDK
     • Build environment

3. Download the APR, APR-util, APR-iconv and libapreq2 archives (I used apr-1.4.2-win32-src.zip, apr-util-1.3.9-win32-src.zip, apr-iconv-1.2.1-win32-src-r2.zip and libapreq2-2.13.tar.gz) from apr.apache.org (you can get libapreq2 here). Unpack all archives to the same directory and rename the subdirectories to apr, apr-util and apr-iconv (those three are build at the same time while libapreq2 is build separately).

4. The instructions about building APR on Windows don’t work for me so this is where things get sketchy: Open a Windows SDK command prompt and navigate to the apr-util directory. Inside this directory execute nmake -f Makefile.win buildall. This doesn’t work for me out of the box because of what’s probably a bug in the APR-util makefile; I needed to replace apr_app with aprapp on lines 176 and 177 of Makefile.win. After this change nmake still exits with errors but nevertheless seems to build libapr-1.dll and libaprutil-1.dll…

5. You also have to build APREQ, last I tried this was a mess on Windows, I collected some notes at the bottom of this page.

Building the SQlite3 database driver on Windows

The SQLite 3 driver is included in the Windows binaries but for the benefit of those who want to build the Apache Portable Runtime on Windows here are the steps involved:

1. Download the precompiled SQLite 3 binaries For Windows (273.98 KiB) and unpack the files somewhere.

2. Create sqlite3.lib from sqlite3.def (included in the precompiled binaries) using the command lib /machine:i386 /def:sqlite3.def and copy sqlite3.lib to apr-util-1.3.9/LibR.

3. Download the corresponding source code distribution (1.20 MiB) and copy sqlite3.h to apr-util-1.3.9/include.

4. Build the driver in the Windows SDK command prompt using the command nmake /f apr_dbd_sqlite3.mak.

5. To install the driver you can copy sqlite3.dll and apr_dbd_sqlite3-1.dll to Lua’s installation directory.

Building libapreq2 on Windows

I wasted a few hours getting libapreq2 version 2.13 to build on Windows because of the following issues:

• The included makefile libapreq2.mak is full of syntax errors.
• The makefile unconditionally includes the Apache module and consequently doesn’t link without a full Apache build.
• The build environment requires a specific flavor of Perl which I haven’t gotten to work.

Eventually I decided to just rewrite the damned makefile and be done with it, enabling me to finally test the HTTP request parsing module on Windows (all tests passed the first time). I’ve included the customized makefile in the Lua/APR git repository.