What is an Apache server?
Apache is a free open-source cross-platform web server. It supports BSD, MS Windows, Linux, Mac OS, BeOS, Novell NetWare and is used by the hosting companies to process the website queries. Owners of shared hosting package only have partial access to change this server or no such access at all. If you purchase a VPS or a dedicated server, you will be able to change any settings.
How to properly set up an Apache server?
Normally an Apache server setup is performed in httpd.conf file. .htaccess file is used in cases when changing global server settings is not possible or settings are being changed for one specific website. You can set up a web server using this manual. In most cases, the .htaccess file can be found in the root folder on the server where the particular website is located, depending on which directory you intend to configure. The server reads the content of .htaccess and applies the settings specified in the file. We will list the main parameters that can be changed in the .htaccess file and might be useful for the developers.
Automatic redirect
- Redirect from http://www.site.com to http://site.com
- Reverse redirect from http://site.com to http://www.site.com
- Moving from an old domain to a new one
- Redirecting site.com/page or site.com/page/ to site.com/page.html
- And reverse from site.com/page.html to site.com/page
- Removing forward slash at the end of the URL (site.com/page/ to site.com/page)
- Redirecting of all pages of one section site.com/section-1/section-2/page to pages of a different section site.com/section-1/page
Error customization
- In case an error occurs the user will see a nice, custom made error page instead of the default error message.
How to set up error processing?
Website security settings
- Injection protection
- Image theft protection
- Blocking users by IP
- File and folder protection
- Working with User agents
How to configure website security?
Website pages encoding
- Working with pages encoding on a server level
Website optimization
- Speeding up the website
- Сaching
- Changing the main page of the website
PHP setup
- Working with PHP setting on a server level
Information on Apache
Configuration reliability and flexibility are among the main advantages of Apache. Using this software allows to modify error messages and use DBMS for user authentication. Starting April 1996 and up till now, Apache was the most common and popular HTTP server on the Internet. According to the August 2007 statistics, it was the server of choice for 51% of all the webservers. By May 2009 the number decreased to 46% but went up to 59% in January 2011. By January 2016 Apache was used by 33.56% of all the webservers, which is over 304 million websites.
Currently, Apache is the second most popular web server after Nginx. Apache is maintained by an open community of developers patronized by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache is included in most software products like IBM WebSphere and DBMS Oracle.
Apache is equipped with a virtual hosts mechanism that allows maintaining multiple domain names (web projects) with their unique content on one IP address. It is possible to specify individual settings for each module and core, as well as access limitation for the whole website or separate files, per each virtual hosting account. Apache ITK allows launching the httpd process with git and uid identifiers for each virtual hosting. There also are modules that allow limiting the usage of the server resources (RAM, CPU, Traffic) per each virtual hosting account.
Correlation with programming languages and software
There are multiple modules that allow Apache to support development systems and multiple programming languages. Some of those are:
- Python (mod wsgi, mod python);
- PHP (mod_php);
- Perl (mod perl);
- Ruby (apache-ruby);
- ASP (apache-asp).
In addition to that, Apache supports FastCGI and CGI that allow executing programs in different programming languages, like Java, sh, C, C++.
Apache official website is http://www.apache.org/
