Chapter 1. Installation

For this cookbook to be useful, you need to install the Apache web server software. So what better way to start than with a set of recipes that deal with the installation?

There are many ways of installing this package; one of the features of open software like Apache is that anyone may make an installation kit. This allows vendors (such as Debian, FreeBSD, Red Hat, Mandrake, Hewlett-Packard, and so on) to customize the Apache file locations and default configuration settings so that these settings fit with the rest of their software. Unfortunately, one of the consequences of customization is that the various prepackaged installation kits are almost all different from one another.

In addition to installing it from a prepackaged kit, of which the variations are legion, there's always the option of building and installing it from the source yourself. This has both advantages and disadvantages; on the one hand you know exactly what you installed and where you put it, but on the other hand, it's likely that binary add-on packages will expect files to be in locations different than those you have chosen.

If setting up the web server is something you're going to do once and never again, using a packaged solution prepared by your system vendor is probably the way to go. However, if you anticipate applying source patches, adding or removing modules, or just fiddling with the server in general, building it yourself from the ground up is probably the preferred method. (The authors of this book, being confirmed bit-twiddlers, always build from source.)

This chapter covers some of the more common prepackaged installation varieties and also how to build them from the source yourself.

Throughout the chapter, we assume that you will be using dynamic shared objects (DSOs) rather than building modules statically into the server. The DSO approach is highly recommended; it not only makes it easy to update individual modules without having to rebuild the entire server, but it also makes adding or removing modules from the server's configuration a simple matter of editing the configuration file.

DSOs on Unixish systems typically have a .so extension; on Windows they end with a .dll suffix.