Linux Tutorials on the topic “apache”


What is Apache?

Apache is the most widely used HTTP web server in the world. This free software (Apache 2.0 License) project has been under active development for over twenty years now, and was initially based on the code of the then discontinued NCSA server. Apache has been around since the very early age of the internet, allowing users to access the world wide web in a secure and efficient way. The fact that Apache was the first web server to serve more than 100 million websites back in 2009 is indicative of the market dominance that software has achieved, with roughly 55% of what we call “the internet” running on it.

There are of course many reasons behind this success, but the most important ones is the fact that Apache's main functionality can be easily extended through the use of modules, as well as the fact that it is so inter-operable. The software is developed and tested by a large world-wide community to run seamlessly under Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, OSX, Solaris, OpenVMS, eComStation, NetWare, TPF and OS/2. Apache also works with 28 programming languages including JavaScript, PHP, Pearl, Python, Tcl, SQL and Ruby. With such a wide spectrum of supported architectures and languages, it is no wonder why Apache is so popular.

Among its rich collection of features and abilities you will find security oriented layers, password and digital certificate authentication tools, virtual hosting of multiple websites in one machine, a collection of graphical user interfaces and a rich set of modules and community developed and maintained add-ons that are dedicated to a single feature or operation.

As performance is critical for web servers, Apache offers deep configurability options to let administrators choose time and request settings, and also a collection of different “multiprocessing” modules that dictate the way Apache operates (process-based, event-based or hybrid). There are also some modules that can significantly reduce the size of web pages, making them lighter and thus faster to serve over HTTP.


Apache and HowtoForge

HowtoForge offers hundreds of analytic guides on how to install, configure and use Apache in Linux distribution that are more focused on the server market such as CentOS, Ubuntu Server, Debian, Fedora and Red Hat Linux. You may also find numerous tutorials on how to install and configure additional modules, how to control web-hosting processes from intuitive GUIs, how to benchmark your Apache server, how to secure your server from SSL attacks, how to install open source content management systems (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal) and cloud services (ownCloud) and set them up on Apache, and countless LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) tutorials that cover just about anything.

Still, if you can't find what you're looking for, don't despair. Visit the helpful HowtoForge forums instead, and ask for the advice of the web administration experts that are hanging out there. There's even a dedicated section named “Server Operation” where people help each other on all things relating to Apache, Samba, MySQL, DNS, Postfix etc.