Handling custom requests through Apache

I have an OSM tile server running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS by going through the guide on the OSM website. I'm now trying to handle custom requests and use render_list to pre-render some tiles and send a single .mbtile file when the rendering is finished.

My plan right now is to make a custom Apache module to handle these requests after installing mod_tile/renderd on the same Apache server. I had two questions if anyone can help:

1. Is this a good way to go about this?
2. I've started looking into creating custom Apache modules. Could someone give a high level explanation of how mod_tile is hooked into Apache and knows to specifically handle only tile requests?

Thank you.