If you want the most recent, experimental version of Apache for testing, check Red Hat's Rawhide distribution, which is also available on the Fedora FTP server (http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/). This distribution is experimental and always contains the latest versions of all RPMs. However, note that the Apache package might depend on new functionality available in other RPMs. Therefore, you might need to install many new RPMs to be able to use packages from Rawhide. If you still want to use an Apache version from the Rawhide distribution for testing, a better option might be to download the source code RPM (SRPM) and compile it yourself. That way, you avoid dependencies on other new packages.
You should be wary of installing experimental packages, and never install them on production servers (that is, servers used in "real life"). Very carefully test the pack ages beforehand on a host that isn't connected to a network!
After you have obtained an Apache RPM, you can install it with the command-line rpm tool by typing the following:
rpm -Uvh latest_apache.rpm
where latest_apache.rpm is the name of the latest Apache RPM.
The Apache RPM installs files in the following directories:
► /etc/httpd/conf — This directory contains the Apache configuration file, httpd.conf. See the section "Configuring Apache for Peak Performance" later in this chapter for more information.
► /etc/rc.d/ — The tree under this directory contains the system startup scripts. The Apache RPM installs a startup script named httpd for the web server under the /etc/rc.d/init.d directory. This script, which you can use to start and stop the server from the command line, also automatically starts and stops the server when the computer is halted, started, or rebooted.
► /var/www — The RPM installs the default server icons, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs, and HTML files in this location. If you want to keep web content elsewhere, you can do so by making the appropriate changes in the server configuration files.
► /var/www/manual/ — If you've installed the apache-manual RPM, you'll find a copy of the Apache documentation in HTML format here. You can access it with a web browser by going to http://localhost/manual/.
► /usr/share/man — Fedora's Apache RPM also contains man pages, which are placed underneath this directory. For example, the httpd man page is in section 8 of the man directory.
► /usr/bin — Some of the utilities from the Apache package are placed here — for example, the htpasswd program, which is used for generating authentication password files.
► /var/log/httpd — The server log files are placed in this directory. By default, there are two important log files (among several others): access_log and error_log. However, you can define any number of custom logs containing a variety of information. See the "Logging" section, later in this chapter, for more detail.
► /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/ — This directory might contain a tar archive containing the source code for Apache and, in some cases, patches for the source. You must have installed the Apache SRPM for these files to be created.
When Apache is running, it also creates the file httpd.pid, containing the process ID of Apache's parent process in the /var/run/ directory.
If you are upgrading to a newer version of Apache, RPM doesn't write over your current configuration files. RPM moves your current files and appends the extension .rpmnew to them. For example, srm.conf becomes srm.conf.rpmnew.
Building the Source Yourself
There are several ways to obtain the source code for Apache. Fedora provides SRPMs containing the source of Apache, which include patches to make it work better with the Fedora distribution. The most up-to-date, stable binary version for Fedora can be installed through Pirut, or by installing a source RPM from Fedora's source repository. When you install one of these SRPMs, a tar archive containing the Apache source is created in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/.
After you have the tar file, you must unroll it in a temporary directory, such as /tmp. Unrolling this tar file creates a directory called apache_version_number, where version_number is the version you've downloaded (for example, apache_1.3.21).
You can also download the source directly from http://www.apache.org/. The latest version at the time of this writing, 2.2.6, is a 6MB compressed tape archive, and the latest pre-2.0 version of Apache is 1.3.31. Although many sites continue to use the older version (for script and other compatibility reasons), many new sites are migrating to or starting out with the latest stable version.
As with many software packages distributed in source code form for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, extracting the source code results in a directory that contains a README and an INSTALL file. Be sure to peruse the INSTALL file before attempting to build and install the software.
./configure to Build ApacheTo build Apache the easy way, run the ./configure script in the directory just created. You can provide it with a --prefix argument to install it in a directory other than the default, which is /usr/local/apache/. Use this command:
# ./configure --prefix=/preferred/directory/
This generates the makefile that's used to compile the server code.
Next, type make to compile the server code. After the compilation is complete, type make install as root to install the server. You can now configure the server via the configuration files. See the "Runtime Server Configuration Settings" section, later in this chapter, for more information.
A safer way to install a new version of Apache from source is to use the ln command to create symbolic links of the existing file locations (listed in the "Installing from the RPM" section earlier in this chapter) to the new locations of the files. This method is safer because the default install locations are different from those used when the RPM installs the files. Failure to use this installation method could result in your web server process not being started automatically at system startup.
Another safe way to install a new version of Apache is to first back up any important configuration directories and files (such as /etc/httpd) and then use the rpm command to remove the server. You can then install and test your new version and, if needed, easily restore your original server and settings.
It is strongly recommended that you use Fedora's RPM version of Apache until you really know what happens at system startup. No "uninstall" option is available when installing Apache from source!