Run your own unix webserver part3

I imagine thousands, if not millions, of inquisitive geeks out there with their FreeBSD servers ready to go. Apache, PHP, and MySQL are installed, and they're just waiting , wondering..."Now What?"

Well the wait is over, my furry little geek friends. Cancel your World of Warcraft membership and do what real men do - run a UNIX web server.

In this lesson, we configure Apache and serve up a PHP page.

This document assumes:

• FreeBSD is installed, and you followed the instructions from part 1 of this series
• Apache 2.x and PHP 5.x are installed, and you followed the instructions from part 2 of this series.

This document also assumes that:

• at least one domain name points to your server
  The one I'm using is example.com. Replace that with your domain in the references below.
• your server has at least one static IP address
  The one I'm using is 10.20.111.2. Again, replace my example IP with your real IP below.

Let's go...I promise this will be quick.

Make a home for your website

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SSH to your server as the user 'web' and create the website root directory:

mkdir ~/www/example.com

Make a homepage for your site

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You can later go back and upload a better site, but for now, we'll just make a quick PHP-driven index page in the website root directory.

Use vi to create and open the index file:

vi ~/www/example.com/index.php

Add the following content:

Save and quit vi. Good. We have a web directory and a home page.

Edit Apache's configuration file

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We need to tell Apache where the new site is. I prefer using name-based Virtual Hosts

Use vi to create and open Apache's config file, called httpd.conf:

vi ~/apache/conf/httpd.conf

Scroll to the bottom and add the following. (Remember, replace my example domain and IP with your real ones)

NameVirtualHost 10.20.111.2:80 # ------------------------------------------------------------------- # # example.com # ------------------------------------------------------------------- # DocumentRoot /home/www/example.com ServerName www.example.com CustomLog "|/usr/local/apache/bin/rotatelogs /usr/local/apache/logs/example.com.log 604800" combined DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm ServerName example.com Redirect / http://www.example.com/

Start Apache

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Starting and stopping apache requires SuperUser (root) privileges, so type su, and enter root's password.

In case the web server was already running, we'll try and stop it first. If you get an error about apache not running, don't worry...

apachectl stop

Before starting or restarting Apache, I test any configuration edit's I've made.

apachectl configtest

You should get, Syntax OK.

Finally, start the server:

apachectl start

In the future, after making Apache configuration changes, restart the server like this:

apachectl configtest apachectl graceful

That gracefully stops the server, re-reads the configuration, and starts up again.

Launch Party

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Open up your favorite browser and go to the site!

If it worked, submit your site to Google, jump out of the nest, and flap your wings. You're on your own now!