Linux Unleashed, Third Edition:Configuring a WWW Site





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Chapter 51Configuring a WWW Site

by Tim Parker

In This Chapter
•   Web server software
•   Apache

Just about everyone on the planet knows about the World Wide Web. It’s the most talked about aspect of the Internet. With the Web’s popularity, more system users are getting into the game by setting up their own WWW servers and “home pages.” There are now sophisticated packages that act as Web servers for many operating systems. Linux, based on UNIX, has the software necessary to provide a Web server.

You don’t need fancy software to set up a Web site, only a little time and the correct configuration information. That’s what this chapter is about. We’ll look at how you can set up a World Wide Web server on your Linux system—whether for friends, your LAN, or the Internet as a whole.
The major aspect of the Web that attracts users and makes it so powerful, aside from its multimedia capabilities, is the use of hyperlinks. A hyperlink lets one click of the mouse move you from document to document, site to site, graphic to movie, and so on. All the instructions of the move are built into the Web code.
There are two main aspects to the World Wide Web: server and client. Client software, such as Mosaic and Netscape, is probably the most familiar. However, many different Web client packages, other than these two are also available, some specifically for X or Linux.
Web Server Software
There are three primary versions of Web server software that will run under Linux. They are from NCSA, CERN, and Plexus. The most readily available system is from NCSA, which also produces Mosaic. NCSA’s Web system is fast and quite small, can run under inetd or as a standalone daemon, and provides pretty good security. For this chapter, we will use NCSA’s Web software, although you can easily use either of the other two packages instead (although the configuration information will be different, of course). There are also popular versions of the Web server package Apache which are available from numerous Linux sources, too. We’ll look at Apache in a section later in this chapter, after dealing with the more traditional Web server systems.

NOTE:  The Web server software for one of the three is available via anonymous FTP or WWW sites listed here, depending on the type of server software you want:CERN: ftp//ftp.w3.org/pub/httpd (FTP)NCSA: ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/web/httpd/unix/ncsa_httpd (FTP) http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu (WWW)Plexus: ftp://austin.bsdi.com/plexus/2.2.1/dist/Plexus-2.2.1.tar.Z (WWW).

The NCSA Web software is available for Linux in both compiled and source code forms. Using the compiled version is much easier because you don’t have to configure and compile the source code for the Linux platform. The binaries are often provided compressed and tarred, and you have to uncompress and then extract the tar library. Alternatively, many CD-ROMs provide the software ready-to-go. If you do obtain the compressed form of the Web server software, follow the installation or README files to place the Web software in the proper location.
Unpacking the Web Files
If you have obtained a library of source code or binaries from an FTP or BBS site, you probably have to untar and uncompress them first. (Check with any README files, if there are any, before you do this; otherwise you may be doing this step for nothing.) Usually, you proceed by creating a directory for the Web software, and then changing it and expanding the library with a command such as this:


zcat httpd_X.X_XXX.tar.Z | tar xvf -


The software is often named by the release and target platform, such as httpd_1.5_linux.tar.Z. Use whatever name your tar file has in the preceding line. Installation instructions are sometimes in a separate tar file, such as Install.tar.z, which you have to obtain and uncompress with the command:


zcat Install.tar.z


Make sure you are in the target directory when you issue these commands, though, or you will have to move a lot of files. You can place the files anywhere; however, it is often a good idea to create a special area for the Web software that can have its permissions controlled, such as /usr/web, /var/web, or a similar name.
Once you have extracted the contents of the Web server distribution and the library files are in their proper directories, you can look at what has been created automatically. You should find the following subdirectories:


cgi-bin
Common gateway interface binaries and scripts

conf
Configuration files

icons
Icons for home pages

src
Source code and (sometimes) executables

support
Support applications






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