Check Dependencies

To install Rivet, you will need Tcl 8.2 or greater and Apache 1.3.xx. It is known to run on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris and HPUX. Windows NT is also possible - please see the directions in the distribution.

Get Rivet

Download the sources at http://tcl.apache.org/rivet/download. Currently the only way to obtain Rivet. In the future, we hope to have a FreeBSD port, Debian package, RPM's, and windows binaries.

Get and Install Apache Sources

If you don't have them, or if you want to build Rivet as a static (built in) part of the Apache web server, you need the source code to Apache, which is available from http://httpd.apache.org/. Otherwise, you don't need to perform this step. Infact, we recommend that you build Rivet as a shared object, and therefore, build it seperately from Apache.

Uncompress Sources

We will assume that you have Apache installed at this point. You must uncompress the Rivet sources in the directory where you wish to compile them.

Building Rivet

Rivet uses a unique build system which we created especially for this project. It utilizes the information included in Apache and Tcl regarding their configurations, in order to compile itself via a series of Tcl scripts, which are located in the buildscripts/ directory.

1. Edit src/make.tcl

   It may be necessary to edit src/make.tcl by hand in order to set certain options. Try the next step first, and see if it's successful.

2. At this point, you are ready to run the build system:

   cd src/ ./make.tcl option

   where option can be either shared or static.

3. Install

   Now, you are ready to run the ./make.tcl install command to install the resulting files. This should copy the shared object (like mod_rivet.so, if one was successfully created, into Apache's libexec directory, as well as install some support scripts and various code.

Apache Configuration Files

Rivet is relatively easy to configure - we start off by adding the module itself:

This tells Apache to load the Rivet shared object, wherever it happens to reside on your file system. Now we have to tell Apache what kind of files are "Rivet" files and how to process them:

These tell Apache to process files with the .rvt and .tcl extensions as Rivet files.

For other directives that Rivet provides for Apache configuration, please see the section called “Rivet Apache Directives”.