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Environment Variables in Apache httpd - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4
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Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4
Apache > HTTP Server > Documentation > Version 2.4Environment Variables in Apache httpd
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There are two kinds of environment variables that affect
the Apache HTTP Server.
First, there are the environment variables controlled by
the underlying operating system. These are set before the
server starts. They can be used in expansions in configuration
files, and can optionally be passed to CGI scripts and SSI
using the PassEnv directive.
Second, the Apache HTTP Server provides a mechanism for storing
information in named variables that are also called environment
variables. This information can be used to control various
operations such as logging or access control. The variables are
also used as a mechanism to communicate with external programs
such as CGI scripts. This document discusses different ways to
manipulate and use these variables.
Although these variables are referred to as environment
variables, they are not the same as the environment
variables controlled by the underlying operating system.
Instead, these variables are stored and manipulated in an
internal httpd structure. They only become actual operating
system environment variables when they are provided to CGI
scripts and Server Side Include scripts. If you wish to
manipulate the operating system environment under which the
server itself runs, you must use the standard environment
manipulation mechanisms provided by your operating system
shell.
Setting Environment Variables
Using Environment Variables
CGI environment variables
Special Purpose Environment Variables
Examples
See alsoComments
Setting Environment Variables
Related ModulesRelated Directivesmod_cachemod_envmod_rewritemod_setenvifmod_unique_idBrowserMatchBrowserMatchNoCasePassEnvRewriteRuleSetEnvSetEnvIfSetEnvIfNoCaseUnsetEnv
Basic Environment Manipulation
The most basic way to set an environment variable in Apache
is using the unconditional SetEnv directive. Variables may also be passed from
the environment of the shell which started the server using the
PassEnv directive.
Conditional Per-Request Settings
For additional flexibility, the directives provided by
mod_setenvif allow environment variables to be set
on a per-request basis, conditional on characteristics of particular
requests. For example, a variable could be set only when a
specific browser (User-Agent) is making a request, or only when
a specific Referer [sic] header is found. Even more flexibility
is available through the mod_rewrite's RewriteRule which uses the
[E=...] option to set environment variables.
Unique Identifiers
Finally, mod_unique_id sets the environment
variable UNIQUE_ID for each request to a value which is
guaranteed to be unique across "all" requests under very
specific conditions.
Standard CGI Variables
In addition to all environment variables set within the
Apache configuration and passed from the shell, CGI scripts and
SSI pages are provided with a set of environment variables
containing meta-information about the request as required by
the CGI
specification.
Some Caveats
It is not possible to override or change the standard CGI
variables using the environment manipulation directives.
When suexec is used to launch
CGI scripts, the environment will be cleaned down to a set of
safe variables before CGI scripts are launched. The
list of safe variables is defined at compile-time in
suexec.c.
For portability reasons, the names of environment
variables may contain only letters, numbers, and the
underscore character. In addition, the first character may
not be a number. Characters which do not match this
restriction will be replaced by an underscore when passed to
CGI scripts and SSI pages.
A special case are HTTP headers which are passed to CGI
scripts and the like via environment variables (see below).
They are converted to uppercase and only dashes are replaced with
underscores; if the header contains any other (invalid) character,
the whole header is silently dropped. See
below for a workaround.
The SetEnv directive runs
late during request processing meaning that directives such as
SetEnvIf and RewriteCond will not see the
variables set with it.
When the server looks up a path via an internal
subrequest such as looking
for a DirectoryIndex
or generating a directory listing with mod_autoindex,
per-request environment variables are not inherited in the
subrequest. Additionally,
SetEnvIf directives
are not separately evaluated in the subrequest due to the API phases
mod_setenvif takes action in.
Using Environment Variables
Related ModulesRelated Directivesmod_authz_hostmod_cgimod_ext_filtermod_headersmod_includemod_log_configmod_rewriteRequireCustomLogAllowDenyExtFilterDefineHeaderLogFormatRewriteCondRewriteRule
CGI Scripts
One of the primary uses of environment variables is to
communicate information to CGI scripts. As discussed above, the
environment passed to CGI scripts includes standard
meta-information about the request in addition to any variables
set within the Apache configuration. For more details, see the
CGI tutorial.
SSI Pages
Server-parsed (SSI) documents processed by
mod_include's
INCLUDES filter can print environment variables
using the echo element, and can use environment
variables in flow control elements to makes parts of a page
conditional on characteristics of a request. Apache also
provides SSI pages with the standard CGI environment variables
as discussed above. For more details, see the SSI tutorial.
Access Control
Access to the server can be controlled based on
environment variables using the Require env
and Require not env directives. In combination with
SetEnvIf, this
allows for flexible control of access to the server based on
characteristics of the client. For example, you can use these
directives to deny access to a particular browser (User-Agent).
Conditional Logging
Environment variables can be logged in the access log using
the LogFormat
option %e. In addition, the decision on whether
or not to log requests can be made based on the status of
environment variables using the conditional form of the
CustomLog
directive. In combination with SetEnvIf this allows for flexible control of which
requests are logged. For example, you can choose not to log
requests for filenames ending in gif, or you can
choose to only log requests from clients which are outside your
subnet.
Conditional Response Headers
The Header
directive can use the presence or
absence of an environment variable to determine whether or not
a certain HTTP header will be placed in the response to the
client. This allows, for example, a certain response header to
be sent only if a corresponding header is received in the
request from the client.
External Filter Activation
External filters configured by mod_ext_filter
using the ExtFilterDefine directive can
by activated conditional on an environment variable using the
disableenv= and enableenv= options.
URL Rewriting
The %{ENV:variable} form of
TestString in the RewriteCond allows mod_rewrite's rewrite
engine to make decisions conditional on environment variables.
Note that the variables accessible in mod_rewrite
without the ENV: prefix are not actually environment
variables. Rather, they are variables special to
mod_rewrite which cannot be accessed from other
modules.
CGI environment variables
The CGI specification defines a number of environment
variables that expand on those defined by the HTTP spec.
These have been adopted more broadly, and are a standard
part of passing information between the browser and the
server, and between processes on the server side. Here we
discuss a few of these. Refer to the CGI spec for further
details.
QUERY_STRING
The QUERY_STRING variable is set to
anything that appears after a question mark (?) at the
end of a requested URL. This is used to pass
information to the server, and may be divided into
key/value pairs. The string should be
URL-encoded.
https://example.com/path/resource.php?key1=value1&key2=another%20value
In the example here, the variable
QUERY_STRING is set to everything
following the ?, and the receiving application (e.g.
CGI or a PHP script, perhaps) is responsible for
parsing the key/value pairs.
PATH_INFO
The variable PATH_INFO is set to
the any value that appears after a matches resource
at the end of the URL, not including any
QUERY_STRING. This is best shown by
an example:
https://example.com/resource.php/additional/data?key1=value1
In the example shown,
PATH_INFO will be set to
/additional/data and
QUERY_STRING will be set to
key1=value1.
Special Purpose Environment Variables
Interoperability problems have led to the introduction of
mechanisms to modify the way Apache behaves when talking to
particular clients. To make these mechanisms as flexible as
possible, they are invoked by defining environment variables,
typically with BrowserMatch, though SetEnv and PassEnv could also be used, for example.
downgrade-1.0
This forces the request to be treated as a HTTP/1.0 request
even if it was in a later dialect.
force-gzip
If you have the DEFLATE filter activated, this
environment variable will ignore the accept-encoding setting of
your browser and will send compressed output unconditionally.
force-no-vary
This causes any Vary fields to be removed from
the response header before it is sent back to the client. Some
clients don't interpret this field correctly; setting this
variable can work around this problem. Setting this variable
also implies force-response-1.0.
force-response-1.0
This forces an HTTP/1.0 response to clients making an HTTP/1.0
request. It was originally
implemented as a result of a problem with AOL's proxies. Some
HTTP/1.0 clients may not behave correctly when given an HTTP/1.1
response, and this can be used to interoperate with them.
gzip-only-text/html
When set to a value of "1", this variable disables the
DEFLATE output filter provided by
mod_deflate for content-types other than
text/html. If you'd rather
use statically compressed files, mod_negotiation
evaluates the variable as well (not only for gzip, but for all
encodings that differ from "identity").
no-gzip
When set, the DEFLATE filter of
mod_deflate will be turned off and
mod_negotiation will refuse to deliver encoded
resources.
no-cache
Available in versions 2.2.12 and later
When set, mod_cache will not save an otherwise
cacheable response. This environment variable does not influence
whether a response already in the cache will be served for the current
request.
nokeepalive
This disables KeepAlive
when set.
prefer-language
This influences mod_negotiation's behaviour. If
it contains a language tag (such as en, ja
or x-klingon), mod_negotiation tries
to deliver a variant with that language. If there's no such variant,
the normal negotiation process
applies.
redirect-carefully
This forces the server to be more careful when sending a redirect
to the client. This is typically used when a client has a known
problem handling redirects. This was originally implemented as a
result of a problem with Microsoft's WebFolders software which has
a problem handling redirects on directory resources via DAV
methods.
suppress-error-charset
Available in versions after 2.0.54
When Apache issues a redirect in response to a client request,
the response includes some actual text to be displayed in case
the client can't (or doesn't) automatically follow the redirection.
Apache ordinarily labels this text according to the character set
which it uses, which is ISO-8859-1.
However, if the redirection is to a page that uses a different
character set, some broken browser versions will try to use the
character set from the redirection text rather than the actual page.
This can result in Greek, for instance, being incorrectly rendered.
Setting this environment variable causes Apache to omit the character
set for the redirection text, and these broken browsers will then correctly
use that of the destination page.
Security note
Sending error pages without a specified character set may
allow a cross-site-scripting attack for existing browsers (MSIE)
which do not follow the HTTP/1.1 specification and attempt to
"guess" the character set from the content. Such browsers can
be easily fooled into using the UTF-7 character set, and UTF-7
content from input data (such as the request-URI) will not be
escaped by the usual escaping mechanisms designed to prevent
cross-site-scripting attacks.
force-proxy-request-1.0, proxy-nokeepalive, proxy-sendchunked,
proxy-sendcl, proxy-chain-auth, proxy-interim-response, proxy-initial-not-pooled
These directives alter the protocol behavior of
mod_proxy. See the mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http
documentation for more details.
ap_trust_cgilike_cl
Available in 2.4.59 and later
This variable allows a script running in CGI-like module to supply it's
own Content-Length HTTP response header. It should
only be set on configuration sections that contain trusted scripts.
Examples
Passing broken headers to CGI scripts
Starting with version 2.4, Apache is more strict about how HTTP
headers are converted to environment variables in mod_cgi
and other modules: Previously any invalid characters
in header names were simply translated to underscores. This allowed
for some potential cross-site-scripting attacks via header injection
(see
Unusual Web Bugs, slide 19/20).
If you have to support a client which sends broken headers and
which can't be fixed, a simple workaround involving mod_setenvif
and mod_headers allows you to still accept
these headers:
#
# The following works around a client sending a broken Accept_Encoding
# header.
#
SetEnvIfNoCase ^Accept.Encoding$ ^(.*)$ fix_accept_encoding=$1
RequestHeader set Accept-Encoding %{fix_accept_encoding}e env=fix_accept_encoding
Changing protocol behavior with misbehaving clients
Earlier versions recommended that the following lines be included in
httpd.conf to deal with known client problems. Since the affected clients
are no longer seen in the wild, this configuration is likely no-longer
necessary.
#
# The following directives modify normal HTTP response behavior.
# The first directive disables keepalive for Netscape 2.x and browsers that
# spoof it. There are known problems with these browser implementations.
# The second directive is for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0b2
# which has a broken HTTP/1.1 implementation and does not properly
# support keepalive when it is used on 301 or 302 (redirect) responses.
#
BrowserMatch "Mozilla/2" nokeepalive
BrowserMatch "MSIE 4\.0b2;" nokeepalive downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
#
# The following directive disables HTTP/1.1 responses to browsers which
# are in violation of the HTTP/1.0 spec by not being able to understand a
# basic 1.1 response.
#
BrowserMatch "RealPlayer 4\.0" force-response-1.0
BrowserMatch "Java/1\.0" force-response-1.0
BrowserMatch "JDK/1\.0" force-response-1.0
Do not log requests for images in the access log
This example keeps requests for images from appearing in the
access log. It can be easily modified to prevent logging of
particular directories, or to prevent logging of requests
coming from particular hosts.
SetEnvIf Request_URI \.gif image-request
SetEnvIf Request_URI \.jpg image-request
SetEnvIf Request_URI \.png image-request
CustomLog "logs/access_log" common env=!image-request
Prevent "Image Theft"
This example shows how to keep people not on your server
from using images on your server as inline-images on their
pages. This is not a recommended configuration, but it can work
in limited circumstances. We assume that all your images are in
a directory called /web/images.
SetEnvIf Referer "^http://www\.example\.com/" local_referal
# Allow browsers that do not send Referer info
SetEnvIf Referer "^$" local_referal
<Directory "/web/images">
Require env local_referal
</Directory>
For more information about this technique, see the
"Keeping Your Images from Adorning Other Sites"
tutorial on ServerWatch.
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