Introduction - Apache
Since the mid 1990's, Apache has been the most popular HTTP server. There are a few reasons for that, including simplicity, low overhead and it's FREE. Installing, configuring and managing an Apache server looks great on a resume, but looks even better when you look back at yourself. Since so many applications and services rely on web servers, it is a good idea to try and install one, to see how and why they work. Following the steps below will walk you through the steps to install Apache from source. For this article, we will be using version 2.2.21.
Step 1 - Dependencies
Apache, luckily doesn't have any special dependencies, unless you wish to use SSL, which you will need OpenSSL-dev, or OpenSSL-Devel packages.
Step 2 - Source Code
Let's get the source!
wget http://apache.cs.utah.edu//httpd/httpd-2.2.21.tar.gz
tar xvzf httpd-2.2.21.tar.gz
Step 3 - Configure/Make/Install
cd httpd-2.2.21
./configure \ --prefix=/usr/local/apache-2.2 \ --enable-ssl \ --enable-auth-digest \ --enable-mem-cache \ --enable-so \ --enable-dav \ --enable-rewrite \ --enable-info \ --enable-http \ --enable-suexec \ --enable-cache
make
sudo make install
Step 4 - Postmortem
Similar to MySQL, we need to create a dedicated user for the Apache daemon as well as copy the daemon to our services directory. You can do that by following these steps:
sudo groupadd appadmin
sudo useradd -r -g appadmin appadmin
sudo cp /usr/local/apache-2.2/bin/apachectl /etc/init.d/apache2
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/apache-2.2/bin
By default, Apache will use the username and group of daemon. We need to manually configure it to use the one which we created above.
Open /usr/local/apache-2.2/conf/httpd.conf and change User and Group (Line 67/68): From:
User daemon
Group daemon
To:
User appadmin
Group appadmin
To start the server, run:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
To have the server start on bootup:
sudo update-rc.d apache2 defaults
Step 5 - Verify It's Running
Run netstat to check to make sure your system is listening on port 80/www:
netstat -a | grep www
The output should look similar to the following:
netstat -a | grep www tcp 0 0 *:www *:* LISTEN
Onto PHP
Enjoy.
