site.toddle

You can’t do much with Apache without a web site to play with. To embody our first shaky steps, we created site.toddle as a subdirectory, /usr/www/APACHE3/site.toddle, which you will find on the code download. Since you may want to keep your demonstration sites somewhere else, we normally refer to this path as ... /. So we will talk about ... /site.toddle. (Windows users, please read this as ...\site.toddle).

In ... /site.toddle, we created the three subdirectories that Apache expects: conf, logs, and htdocs. The README file in Apache’s root directory states:

The next step is to edit the configuration files for the server. In the subdirectory called conf you should find distribution versions of the three configuration files: srm.conf-dist, access.conf-dist, and httpd.conf-dist.

As a legacy from the NCSA server, Apache will accept these three Config files. But we strongly advise you to put everything you need in httpd.conf and to delete the other two. It is much easier to manage the Config file if there is only one of them. From Apache v1.3.4-dev on, this has become Group doctrine. In earlier versions of Apache, it was necessary to disable these files explicitly once they were deleted, but in v1.3 it is enough that they do not exist.

The README file continues with advice about editing these files, which we will disregard. In fact, we don’t have to set about this job yet; we will learn more later. A simple expedient for now is to run Apache with no configuration and to let it prompt us for what it needs.

The Configuration File

Before we start running Apache with no configuration, we would like to say a few words about the philosophy of the Configuration File. Apache comes with a huge file that, as we observe elsewhere, tries to tell you every possible thing the user might need to know about Apache. If you are new to the software, a vast amount of this will be gibberish to you. However, many Apache users modify this file to adapt it to their needs.

We feel that this is a VERY BAD IDEA INDEED. The file is so complicated to start with that it is very hard to see what to do. It is all too easy to make amendments and then to forget what you have done. The resulting mess then stays around, perhaps for years, being teamed with possibly incompatible Apache updates, until it finally stops working altogether. It is then very difficult to disentangle your input from the absolute original (which you probably have not kept and is now unobtainable).

It is much better to start with a completely minimal file and add to it only what is absolutely necessary.

The set-up process for Unix and Windows systems is quite different, so they are described in two separate sections as follows. If you’re using Unix, read on; if not, skip to Section 2.4 later in this chapter.