The Apache Web Server

Chapter 6: The Apache Web Server

For most people, the World Wide Web has become synonymous with the Internet. No discussion of

Internet services is complete without mention of web servers. Web servers have become an

essential part of every networked business—they are used to advertise products and offer services

to external customers as well as to coordinate and disseminate information within the organization.

Linux systems make excellent web servers. In fact, the Apache server software that comes with

Linux is the most widely used web server in the world. The daemon that Apache installs on a Linux

system to create a web server is the Hypertext Transport Protocol daemon (httpd). This chapter

describes how you can create your own web server with Apache and Linux by installing Apache and

running httpd. It provides all the information you need to understand a default Apache configuration

and to make the adjustments needed for an average server. For more advanced needs, see Linux, by Charles Aulds (Sybex, 2000).

Installing Apache

The Apache web server is part of most Linux distributions, and that includes the Red Hat Linux

distribution that we are using as an example. The Apache web server software is one of the

components that can be selected during the operating system installation. See Appendix A,

"Installing Linux," for a description of this procedure.

If Apache is not among the software you selected during the initial installation, you need to install it

now. The easiest way to install software is with a package manager. There are a couple that are

available, but the most popular (and the one used on our sample Red Hat system) is the RPM

Package Manager (RPM). In earlier chapters, we saw an example of the X−based Gnome RPM

tool. RPM can also be used from the command line to manage the installation of optional software.

Use the rpm command to install the software you need, remove software you don't want, and check

what software is installed in your system. rpm has many possible options, but most of them are for

the developers who build the packages you want to install. For a network administrator, rpm can be

reduced to three basic commands:

· rpm –i package: The –i option is used to install software.

· rpm –e package: The –e option is used to remove software.

rpm –q: The –q option is used to list a software package already installed in the computer.

Use –qa to list all installed packages.

·

To find the Apache package delivered with the distribution, mount the Linux distribution CD−ROM,

and look in the RPMS directory. Here is an example from our Red Hat system:

$ cd /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS

$ ls *apache*

apache−1.3.20−16.i386.rpm

apacheconf−0.8.1−1.noarch.rpm

This example assumes that the CD−ROM was mounted on /mnt/cdrom. It shows that two software

packages related to Apache are included in the Red Hat distribution. One is the web server

Apache Web Server Administration