Preface

The Apache web server is a remarkable piece of software. The basic package distributed by the Apache Software Foundation is quite complete and very powerful, and a lot of effort has gone into keeping it from suffering software bloat. One facet of the package makes it especially remarkable: it includes extensibility by design. In short, if the Apache package right out of the box does not do what you want, you can generally extend it so that it does. Dozens of extensions (called modules) are included as part of the package distributed by the Apache Software Foundation. And if one of these doesn't meet your needs, with several million users out there, there is an excellent chance someone else has already done your work for you, who has concocted a recipe of changes or enhancements to the server that will satisfy your requirements.

This book is a collection of these recipes. Its sources include tips from the firehose of the USENET newsgroups, the Apache FAQ, Apache-related mailing lists, mail containing "how-to" questions, questions and problems posed on IRC chat channels, and volunteered submissions.

All of the items in this book come from real-life situations, encountered either by us or by other people who have asked for our help. The topics range from basic compilation of the source code to complex problems involving the treatment of URLs that require SSL encryption.

We've collected more than a hundred different problems and their solutions, largely based on how often they occurred, and have grouped them roughly by subject as shown in What's in This Book.

Primarily, these recipes are useful to webmasters who are responsible for the entire server; however, many are equally applicable to users who want to customize the behavior in their own web directories through the use of .htaccess files.

We've written Apache Cookbook to be a practical reference, rather than a theoretical discourse: reading it recipe by recipe, chapter by chapter, isn't going to reveal a plot ("Roy Fielding in the Library with an RFC!"^[1]). It's intended to provide point solutions to specific problems, located through the table of contents or the index.

^[1] An obscure reference to a board game called Clue and an obscure developer of HTTP.