mod_cookietrack

A vastly improved version of mod_usertrack, supporting DNT, rolling expires, redirects and much much more.

Building

Make sure you have apxs2 and perl installed, which on Ubuntu you can get by running:

  $ sudo apt-get install apache2-dev perl

From the checkout directory run:

  $ sudo perl build.pl --install

This will build, install & enable the module on your system

Configuration

See the file 'DOCUMENTATION' in the same directory as this README for all the extra features this module has compared to mod_usertrack, as well as documentation on the configuration directives supported.

Custom UID generation

Create a C file or library that has a 'gen_uid' function with the following prototype:

  void gen_uid( char *uid, char *timestamp, char *ip );

Where 'timestamp' is a 16 character microtime, 'ip' is the remote IP address and 'uid' is a char pointer for you to store the UID to use for this request.

And then, build the module like this (any gcc linking target is acceptable):

  $ sudo perl build.pl --inc /where/my_uid/lives --lib my_uid.c

Testing

*** Note: for this will you will need Apache, NodeJS *** and Perl installed.

First, start the backend node based server. It serves as an endpoint and shows you the received url & headers for every call:

  $ test/run_backend.sh

Next, start a custom Apache server. This will have all the modules needed and the endpoints for testing:

  $ sudo test/run_httpd.sh

Then, run the test suite:

  $ perl test/01_cookietrack.pl

Run it as follows to enable diagnostic/debug output:

  $ perl test/01_cookietrack.pl --debug

Note that if you're using a custom library for generating the UID, be sure to pass the length of the expected cookie as the second argument. So, if your library generates UIDs of 12-16 characters, use:

  $ perl test/01_cookietrack.pl --cookielength 12,16

There will be an error log available, and that will be especially useful if you built the library with --debug:

  $ tail -F test/error.log

Building your own package

Make sure you have dpkg-dev, cdbs and debhelper installed, which on Ubuntu you can get by running:

$ sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev cdbs debhelper

Then build the package by first compiling the module, then running buildpackage:

$ perl build.pl
$ dpkg-buildpackage -d -b