Apache Control for MacOS X Beta

by Gavin Clark <gavin@datacor.com>

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Apache Control does the following amazing things:

Apache Control is really just a graphical front end to 'apachectl' a command line UNIX application which does all the real work. But if you hate typing or never want to touch a command line then Apache Control is for you.

From a programming point of view it does some neat things:

It gets your root password just like "System Preferences" using the built in netInfo panel. It allows you to execute commmands as root. it takes info returned from a command line app and displays it in a text box. and it uses several Interface Builder tricks for user feedback.

It's a complete interface to a nifty UNIX command line tool and it only took me two days, about half of that time was spent online getting help and learning how to do it. I think this is good news for people worrying about the command line ruining the Mac way of life. If I can do this over a weekend for fun then GUI front ends for lots of command line tools should pop up soon.

Notes:

lynx is required for the status report. I placed a copy in the resources folder because OSX Beta does not include it and I didn't want users to go through the hassle of installing UNIX software. The linx binary triples the size of the package. Before the status report will work you have to edit the apache config file to load mod_status - basically you uncomment a few lines then restart apache.

A couple of things are flaky.
  1. The function that updates the user interface can be called before the restart has finished so the buttons are sometimes left in an incorrect state.
  2. It won't work if you are logged in as root. I need to check for that and disable some things.
  3. There is really only one type of status report.

Copyright

This code is "as is - no warrantee!"
Use it at your own risk.

Some of this code was adapted from WebGrabber by Eric Peyton (c) 1999 epicware, Inc., Eric Peyton, epeyton@epicware.com