Instructions for local Apache installation

Downloading, unpacking and compiling

Make sure that you have enough disk space. On a Linux system you need (approximately):

55MB to build the system. Below, I assume that you build in $HOME/temp, but you can build in /tmp (or whatever)
23MB free space in your home directory to install. Below, I assume that you install in $HOME/httpd. If you don't have 23MB, do not install the complete manual by running "make" on selected targets, or removing the directory $HOME/httpd/manual after installation. This will free about 16MB.

Go to the Apache dowload site and download the source for UNIX (you will work on UNIX, won't you?) you can use .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 version if your tar supports 'bzip' compression.
From now on, these instructions will assume that you want Apache installed in $HOME/httpd. You can modify the instructions easily to work with any other directory in which you have read, write and execute permissions.

Unpack your sources:

      mkdir $HOME/temp
      cd $HOME/temp
      tar -zxvf /tmp/httpd-2.0.54.tar.gz

You should have the Apache source tree in the directory httpd-2.0.54.

Compile Apache:

      cd httpd-2.0.54
      ./configure --prefix=$HOME/httpd
      make
      make install

At this point, your Apache should be installed in $HOME/httpd. You should see the following directory tree in $HOME/httpd:

.
./include
./lib
./build
./bin
./modules
./conf
./htdocs
./error
./error/include
./icons
./icons/small
./logs
./cgi-bin
./man
./man/man1
./man/man8
./manual
./manual/developer
./manual/faq
./manual/howto
./manual/images
./manual/misc
./manual/mod
./manual/platform
./manual/programs
./manual/rewrite
./manual/ssl
./manual/style
./manual/style/lang
./manual/style/css
./manual/style/xsl
./manual/style/xsl/util
./manual/style/latex
./manual/vhosts

Overview of the installation directories

Let us mention the directories and files important to us:

./conf/httpd.conf is the main configuration file of apache
./cgi-bin is the directory for CGI scripts
./logs is the log directory. Check there for errors when running CGI, checking for broken links, etc.
./htdocs is the directory for "plain" HTML. This is what the remote user would see when connecting to the server. In particular, the file index.html file in that directory is the server home page. Apache comes with some files in this directory preconfigured. Typically, one just moves them out of the way upon installing Apache.

Configuring the port

With a text editor of your choice (Emacs? vi?) open ./conf/httpd.conf

Change the port on which Apache listens from 80 to 8080 (or whatever, but > 1024):

....
#
# Change this to Listen on specific IP addresses as shown below to 
# prevent Apache from glomming onto all bound IP addresses (0.0.0.0)
#
#Listen 12.34.56.78:80

Listen 8080

....

Configuring CGI

Enable CGI. Normally, Apache comes with CGI enabled in a particular directory, with the ScriptAlias directive:
```
# The same rules about trailing "/" apply to ScriptAlias directives as to
# Alias.
#
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/home2/developer/httpd/cgi-bin/"
      
```
This requires that you put any CGI scripts that you want to run in "/home2/developer/httpd/cgi-bin".

Running Apache

The server is started, stopped and restarted using a program apachectl. Call this program with no arguments to see the options. Start the server with:

~/httpd/bin/apachectl start

Point your browser at "http://localhost:8080" and see if you can view the home page of your server.

Testing your CGI configuration

The ./httpd/cgi-bin directory contains a simple test script, but it is not enabled for security reasons. Do the following:

cd $HOME/cgi-bin
cp test-cgi test-cgi.cgi
chmod ugo+x test-cgi.cgi

Now, connect to "http://localhost:8080/cgi-bin/test-cgi.cgi?arg=foo" with your browser. You should see this:

CGI/1.0 test script report:

argc is 0. argv is .

SERVER_SOFTWARE = Apache/2.0.54 (Unix)
SERVER_NAME = localhost
GATEWAY_INTERFACE = CGI/1.1
SERVER_PROTOCOL = HTTP/1.1
SERVER_PORT = 8080
REQUEST_METHOD = GET
HTTP_ACCEPT = text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
PATH_INFO = 
PATH_TRANSLATED = 
SCRIPT_NAME = /cgi-bin/test-cgi.cgi
QUERY_STRING = arg=foo
REMOTE_HOST =
REMOTE_ADDR = 127.0.0.1
REMOTE_USER =
AUTH_TYPE =
CONTENT_TYPE =
CONTENT_LENGTH =

Now you are ready to run your own CGI scripts by putting them in $HOME/httpd/cgi-bin.

A note on DocumentRoot, ServerRoot and mapping browser requests to files

The configuration variable DocumentRoot is configured by this fragment of httpd.conf:

#
# DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve your
# documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but
# symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations.
#
DocumentRoot "/home2/developer/httpd/htdocs"

The similarly named variable ServerRoot should not be confused with DocumentRoot. ServerRooot is the name of the UNIX directory where the configuration files reside. If you use the above configuration, ServerRoot is $HOME/httpd (where the directory "conf" with the file "httpd.conf" lives).

Document Root is the top directory in which the HTML files reside. This is a UNIX directory! In general, the term "directory" refers to the UNIX directory, while the term "location" is used to refer to a directory relative to the server root. Thus, if the browser requests "http://server_host/foo/bar.html", Apache configured as above, will serve the file /home2/developer/httpd/htdocs/foo/bar.html.

Marek Rychlik <rychlik@u.arizona.edu>

Last modified: Fri Apr 22 21:38:21 MST 2005