Introducing Thornhill

At $WORK I'm moving a web server to a new machine. Natch, I'm getting the new one ready, testing as I go, and when things are good I'll change DNS to point to the new machine. I found myself testing a lot of Apache Alias directives -- we've accumulated rather a lot -- my usual routine:

• Fire up my laptop
• Edit /etc/hosts and add a record for the website pointing at the new server
• Fire up the browser on the laptop
• Fire up the browser on my desktop
• Look up the Alias record in httpd.conf
• Type it into both
• vgrep for differences

...was getting damned tiresome. Perl to the rescue! WWW::Mechanize, Test::More and Apache::Admin::Config are damned useful, and when the authors weren't looking I bent them to my will.

So: thornhill, a Small but Useful(tm) script to check URLs mentioned in Apache config files. Here's what it does:

• Sucks in an httpd.conf file
• Looks for all the Alias directives in the VirtualHost section
• Verifies that the content of those URLs on the old and new server is identical

We'll call this release 0.1 ("works for me!"). You can download it here; be sure to note the bugs and assumptions.

Share and enjoy!

Update: Problems have arisen.