Apache Web Server

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How to Install, Configure (Server, Virtual Hosts, etc.), Secure, and manage Logs on for Apache 2 on Ubuntu.

Install

The simplest task is installing Apache 2 on Ubuntu. This process has not changed significantly in several versions.

sudo apt install apache2

After this finishes, all required packages are installed and we can test it by going to the default page on our server with a browser. Usually you should see something like this:

Apache2_defautl_page.png

Configuration

The first thing you might notice is the location of the resources (web pages) that the server will look in. /var/www/html

The second thing you should know about Linux systems in general is that they almost always include documentation,AND THAT DOCUMENTATION IS SPECIFIC TO THE PLATFORM YOU ARE ON! In this case You will notice that the documentation for this installation references /usr/share/doc/apache2/README.Debian.gz. This tells us that the documentation for this installation (which builds on the Debian distribution) is gzipped and the location of that file.

How would you look at that file without unzipping it? less /usr/share/doc/apache2/README.Debian.gz will show you the page just as if it was a man page.

Demo/View Configuraton:

Security

Correctly configuring Apache goes a long way to securing it. To that end, we are going to look at the documentation related to hardening the apache server on ubuntu/debian.