How to serve Perl source files

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 19:45:00 +0200
debian, sys-admin

I noticed a while ago a Perl script file included on my blog wasn’t served properly, since the charset wasn’t announced and web browsers didn’t display it properly. The received file was still valid UTF-8 (hello, little © character), at least!

First, wrong intuition

Reading Apache’s /etc/apache2/conf.d/charset it looks like the following directive might help:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

but comments there suggest reading the documentation! And indeed that alone isn’t sufficient since this would only affect text/plain and text/html. The above directive would have to be combined with something like this in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/mime.conf:

AddType text/plain .pl

Real solution

To avoid any side effects on other file types, the easiest way forward seems to avoid setting AddDefaultCharset and to associate the UTF-8 charset with .pl files instead, keeping the text/x-perl MIME type, with this single directive (again in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/mime.conf):

AddCharset UTF-8 .pl

Looking at response headers (wget -d) we’re moving from:

Content-Type: text/x-perl

to:

Content-Type: text/x-perl; charset=utf-8

Conclusion

Nothing really interesting, or new. Just a small reminder that tweaking options too hastily is sometimes a bad idea. In other news, another Perl script is coming up soon. :)