As you will learn in later chapters, AxKit offers quite a number of runtime configuration options that allow fine-grained control over every phase of the XML processing and delivery cycle. Getting a basic working configuration requires very little effort, however. In fact, AxKit ships with a sample configuration file that can be included into Apache’s main server configuration (or used as a road map for adding the configuration directives manually, if you decide to go that way instead).

Copy the example.conf file in the AxKit distribution’s examples directory into Apache’s conf directory, renaming it axkit.conf. Then, add the following to the bottom of your httpd.conf file:

# AxKit Setup
Include conf/axkit.conf

You now need to edit the new axkit.conf file to match the XML processing libraries that you installed earlier by uncommenting the AxAddStyleMap directives that correspond to tools you chose. For example, if you installed libxslt and XML::LibXSLT, you would uncomment the AxAddStyleMap directive that loads AxKit’s interface to LibXSLT. Example 2-1 helps to clarify this.

# Load the AxKit core.
PerlModule AxKit

# Associates Axkit with a few common XML file extensions
AddHandler axkit .xml .xsp .dkb .rdf 

# Uncomment to add XSLT support via XML::LibXSLT
# AxAddStyleMap text/xsl Apache::AxKit::Language::LibXSLT

# Uncomment to add XSLT support via Sablotron
# AxAddStyleMap text/xsl Apache::AxKit::Language::Sablot

# Uncomment to add XPathScript Support
# AxAddStyleMap application/x-xpathscript Apache::AxKit::Language::XPathScript

# Uncomment to add XSP (eXtensible Sever Pages) support
# AxAddStyleMap application/x-xsp Apache::AxKit::Language::XSP

The one hard-and-fast rule about configuring AxKit is that the PerlModule directive that loads the AxKit core into Apache via mod_perl must appear at the top lexical level of your httpd.conf file, or one of the files that it includes. All other AxKit configuration directives may appear as children of other configuration directive blocks in whatever way best suits your server policy and application needs, but the PerlModule AxKit line must appear only at the top level.