Apache :: mod_sed

DaveA66 · Joined: 13 Mar 2015 Posts: 4

Hi

I am using (or trying to) mod_sed - I want to add an advertising banner to every web page served.

the problem is I cannot seem to make the OutputSed command recognise absolute paths. I can make it work with a relative path for both the image and the <a> href, but not absolute, which is awkward as the webite wiill have different directories for content created by FTP for hosting results of different tournaments.

This is what I have in my vhost.conf file for the banner image:

DaveA66 · Joined: 13 Mar 2015 Posts: 4

I should add that the above just leaves a placeholder for the image when the pages are rendered, so I know the sed bit is working it just will not locate the file!

Thanks

glsmith

On any other day would this work directly in your html page?

<img src="/var/www/fencing-results.co.uk/banner.jpg">

I doubt it. You cannot call anything like that in the html page because everything is relative to the DocumentRoot. What Apache would try to serve because your browser would request it would be;
/var/www/fencing-results.co.uk/var/www/fencing-results.co.uk/banner.jpg

No, instead you would just have this in your image tag;
<img src="/banner.jpg">

Just because you're doing this in the config, what mod_sed is going to do is change the text/html of the output. The browser is still responsible for actually requesting the image.

So this should work for you better I'd imagine;
OutputSed "s/<body>/<body><img src=\"\/banner.jpg\">/g"

You can also use | in sed for the separator and not have to escape paths;
OutputSed "s|<body>|<body><img src=\"/banner.jpg\">|g"

DaveA66 · Joined: 13 Mar 2015 Posts: 4

Hi

thanks for the reply!

Yes, that was it, what I had not realised was that everything would be relative to the root.
My background is more IIS

I had exactly the same problem of I tried to put the image inside an <a></a> as well, I could not use an absolute URL. (or get any valid URL to work). Thsi was trying to link to another site completely.

If I tried to link the image to, say http://domain.com
The actual URL requested by the browser would be

http://fencing-results.co.uk/nafc/spring15/domain.com
Or something similar.

DaveA66 · Joined: 13 Mar 2015 Posts: 4

Is it possible to use mod_sed (Or OutputSed more correctly) to execute some PHP to provide the changed content.
So, roughly, OutputSed "s/Text to search For/Text returned by some code/g"

Sorry if that sound a bit clueless Smile

Thanks!

glsmith

Not sure, it would depend on where in the chain mod_sed sits, is it before the output is sent to PHP or after? I suppose there's no better way to know for sure than to try. What is the worst that can happen? It doesn't work!