Posted on Do 19 Januar 2006

Avahi Support for Apache

The first release of mod_dnssd is now available. It adds DNS-SD based Zeroconf support to Apache 2.0 using Avahi.

This work has been inspired by Sander Temme's and Sebastien Estienne's mod_zeroconf module, but supersedes it in every way. MacOSX ships with mod_rendezvous/mod_bonjour, but mod_dnssd is much more powerful than this piece of software as well. In short: mod_dnssd is definitely the greatest way to add Zeroconf support to Apache available today.

A few examples just to show how great mod_dnssd is:

DNSSDEnable On

This is everything you need to enable DNS-SD support in Apache after loading the module. It will publish all virtual hosts and all existing mod_userdir directories (i.e. ~/public_html) as services of type _http._tcp.

In case you want to publish some subdirectory of the web server as service, just place DNSSDServiceName inside a <Location> section for that path:

<Location /foobar>
	DNSSDServiceName "A special service called foobar"
</Location>

You can even use it to publish WebDAV shares using Apache's mod_dav module:

<Location /webdav>
	Dav On
	DNSSDServiceName "A WebDAV folder"
	DNSSDServiceTypes _webdav._tcp
</Location>

This especially cool since we now have a free software server counterpart for Gnome's and KDE's WebDAV client functionality.

Or to publish your blog as RSS service:

<Location /blog.cgi?rss>
	DNSSDServiceName "The blog"
	DNSSDServiceTypes _rss._tcp
</Location>

Get it while it is hot!

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