module development: sharing data between different request phases

[Severin Schoepke]

Hello there,

I'm in the process of writing a custom nginx module that should do some header 
manipulation and some logging of strings created in that manipulation process. 
The module/nginx then proxies the requests to another backend...

So far I have implemented a handler function that does the header manipulation 
and added it to the ACCESS phase. Now I'm implementing a handler function that 
should log some temporary data from the header manipulation to a file and added 
it to the LOG phase.

Now I'm wondering how I can share/transfer some data/strings from the ACCESS 
phase handler to the LOG phase handler?
- Is there some arbitrary user storage associated with a ngx_http_request_t that 
I could use?
- Could I use variables for that? If so: how do I set a per-request variable in 
one handler and read it in another?
- Or do I need to use a hack like storing the data in a X-Log-Data in either 
headers_in or headers_out and reading it from this header in the log handler? 
This feels very hacky and would expose the log data to the either the client or 
the backend...
- Is there another hacky solution that I could use?

Thanks a lot!

cheers, Severin