As we saw earlier, a module should be loaded before its handler can be used. PerlModule and PerlRequire are the two mod_perl directives that are used to load modules and code. They are almost equivalent to Perl's use( ) and require( ) functions (respectively) and are called from the Apache configuration file. You can pass one or more module names as arguments to PerlModule:

PerlModule Apache::DBI CGI DBD::Mysql

Generally, modules are preloaded from the startup script, which is usually called startup.pl. This is a file containing Perl code that is executed through the PerlRequire directive. For example:

PerlRequire  /home/httpd/perl/lib/startup.pl

A PerlRequire filename can be absolute or relative to the ServerRoot or to a path in @INC.

As with any file with Perl code that gets use( ) d or require( ) d, it must return a true value. To ensure that this happens, don't forget to add 1; at the end of startup.pl.