Running Apache Under Unix

When you run Apache now, you may get the following error message:

httpd: cannot determine local hostname
Use ServerName to set it manually.

What Apache means is that you should put this line in the httpd.conf file:

ServerName <yourmachinename>

Finally, before you can expect any action, you need to set up some documents to serve. Apache’s default document directory is ... /httpd/htdocs — which you don’t want to use because you are at /usr/www/APACHE3/site.toddle — so you have to set it explicitly. Create ... /site.toddle/htdocs, and then in it create a file called 1.txt containing the immortal words “hullo world.” Then add this line to httpd.conf :

DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/site.toddle/htdocs

The complete Config file, .../site.toddle/conf/httpd.conf, now looks like this:

User webuser
Group webgroup

ServerName my586

DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/site.toddle/htdocs/

#fix 'Out of the Box' default problems--remove leading #s if necessary
#ServerRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/APACHE3/site.toddle
#ErrorLog logs/error_log
#PIDFile logs/httpd.pid
#TypesConfig conf/mime.types

When you fire up httpd, you should have a working web server. To prove it, start up a browser to access your new server, and point it at http://<yourmachinename>/.^[3]

As we know, http means use the HTTP protocol to get documents, and / on the end means go to the DocumentRoot directory you set in httpd.conf.

Lynx is the text browser that comes with FreeBSD and other flavors of Unix; if it is available, type:

% lynx http://<
               yourmachinename>
               /

You see:

INDEX OF /
* Parent Directory
* 1.txt

If you move to 1.txt with the down arrow, you see:

hullo world

If you don’t have Lynx (or Netscape, or some other web browser) on your server, you can use telnet :^[4]

% telnet <
               yourmachinename>
                80

You should see something like:

Trying 192.168.123.2
Connected to my586.my.domain
Escape character is '^]'

Then type:

               GET / HTTP/1.0 <CR><CR>

You should see:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Sat, 24 Aug 1996 23:49:02 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<HEAD><TITLE>Index of /</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Index of </H1>
<UL><LI> <A HREF="/"> Parent Directory</A>
<LI> <A HREF="1.txt"> 1.txt</A>
</UL></BODY>
Connection closed by foreign host.

This is a rare opportunity to see a complete HTTP message. The first lines are headers that are normally hidden by your browser. The stuff between the < and > is HTML, written by Apache, which, if viewed through a browser, produces the formatted message shown by Lynx earlier, and by Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer in the next chapter.

^[3] Note that if you are on the same machine, you can use http://127.0.0.1/ or http://localhost/, but this can be confusing because virtual host resolution may cause the server to behave differently than if you had used the interface’s “real” name.

^[4] telnet is not really suitable as a web browser, though it can be a very useful debugging tool.