Apache is the most widely used website hosting applications. At the time of this article, Apache is reported to have about 70% of the market. While Microsoft IIS has dropped dramatically to 30%. I’ve personally been using Apache for the last 15 years had have never ever had any problems with the application. All the problems I’ve had were related to typos in my configuration files.
To get Apache up and running, you need to do 2 things.
1) install apache
2) start apache
That is basically all you need to know, to get apache up and running. Fairly simple. But of course human nature creeps in and we want to start customizing and personalizing.
To Installing apache2 via apt-get:
sudo apt-get install apache2
Starting apache2 for the first time
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
If you get this error:
apache2: Could not determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
You need to add “ServerName localhost” to the “/etc/apache2/conf.d/fqdn” file. This can all be done in a single command:
echo "ServerName localhost" | sudo tee /etc/apache2/conf.d/fqdn
If you need to Start|Stop|Reload|etc Apache’s httpd daemon on Ubuntu, you’d want to use the “/etc/init.d/apache2″ commands:
Usage: /etc/init.d/apache2 {
start
stop
restart
reload
force-reload
start-htcacheclean
stop-htcacheclean
status
}
If you are using any other operating system, you’d want to use the apachectl command:
apachectl – Apache HTTP Server Control Interface
apachectl commands
start : Loads the org.apache.httpd launchd job.
stop, graceful-stop : Unloads the org.apache.httpd launchd job.
restart, graceful : Unloads, then loads the org.apache.httpd launchd job.
fullstatus : Displays a full status report from mod_status. For this to work,
you need to have mod_status enabled on your server and a text-based
browser such as lynx available on your system. The URL used to access the
status report can be set by editing the STATUSURL variable in the script.
status : Displays a brief status report. Similar to the fullstatus option, except
that the list of requests currently being served is omitted.
configtest : Run a configuration file syntax test. It parses the configuration files
and either reports Syntax Ok or detailed information about the particular
syntax error. This is equivalent to apachectl -t.
The following option was available in earlier versions but has been removed.
(It is now built into the httpd daemon).
startssl : To start httpd with SSL support, you should edit your configuration
file to include the relevant directives and then use the normal apachectl start.
The main files/directories you will be working with first are:
apache2.conf : the configuration file
sites-available : a directory to let Apache know what sites are available to be accessed by httpd
sites-enables : a directory to let Apache know which websites need to be loading on start
A list of the default apache2 configuration file structure in “/etc/apache2/”:
dmccoy@server:/etc/apache2# ls -l /etc/apache2/
total 48
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10104 2009-04-01 11:01 apache2.conf
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-17 05:16 conf.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 378 2009-04-01 11:01 envvars
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2009-07-13 10:57 httpd.conf
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 2009-07-17 05:16 mods-available
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-13 10:57 mods-enabled
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 513 2009-04-01 11:01 ports.conf
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-22 00:54 sites-available
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-13 10:57 sites-enabled
The default web site is located at:
if you launch the domain in a web browser “http://localhost” you should see a message “It Works!”. If you are using the server version with out a gui, you can use “lynx http://localhost”. If lynx isn’t installed, you can use apt-get to install it.
If you need to maintain more then (1) website, you can use a Virtual Host to manage its location and access. Below is the default Virtual Host sample, located in “/etc/apache2/sites-available/default/”
There are (4) lines that you need to change.
1) You’ll need to change the ServerAdmin from webmaster@localhost to your_admin_account@domain.name email address.
2) If you are changing your default location of DocumentRoot /var/www, you’ll need to edit the path here. An instance where you’d need to change this directory, is if it was located on a different hard drive or hard drive partition.
3) If you change your DocumentRoot, then you’ll need to change the Directory from /var/www/ to your new path.
4) You’ll also need to change your log names to allow easier management of multiple domains. ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log and CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined could be changed to domain.name-error.log and domain.name-access.log.
< VirtualHost *:80 >
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www
< Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
< /Directory >
< Directory /var/www/ >
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
< /Directory >
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
< Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin" >
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
< /Directory >
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
< Directory "/usr/share/doc/" >
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
< /Directory >
< /VirtualHost >
Below is a sample VirtualHost file for a domain.
< VirtualHost *:80 >
ServerAdmin dmccoy @ server .com
ServerName server.com
ServerAlias server
DocumentRoot /var/www
< Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
< /Directory >
< Directory /var/www/server.com >
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
< /Directory >
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
< Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin" >
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
< /Directory >
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/server.com-error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/server.com-access.log combined
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
< Directory "/usr/share/doc/" >
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
< /Directory >
< /VirtualHost >
You’ll Notice that I added (2) extra lines. I added “ServerName” and “ServerAlias“.
ServerName : Description : Hostname and port that the server uses to identify itself
ServerName : Syntax : ServerName fully-qualified-domain-name[:port]
ServerName : Usage : ServerName www.example.com:80
ServerAlias : Description : Alternate names for a host used when matching requests to name-virtual hosts
ServerAlias : Syntax : ServerAlias hostname [hostname] …
ServerAlias : Usage : ServerAlias server server2.domain.com server2
If by change you need manage another domain, you can copy the default virtualhost file and edit those same 4 lines to create another domain. And if you have another, you repeat the steps until all your domains are entered.
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain.name
Now that you’ve made your sites available to httpd (Apache), you can now enable them to be used by httpd. The easiest way to do this, is to make a symbolic link from the sites-available directory to the sites-enabled directory. Below is how I would enable the default domain for this server.
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/default
Once you have enabled all the domains you need, you can now restart Apache to make them active.
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
[sudo] password for dmccoy:
* Restarting web server apache2
... waiting ...done.