Installing Apache 1.3 on Linux and Unix

tar xvfz apache_1.3.33.tar.gz cd apache_1.3.33 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache --enable- shared=max make make install

You can use the package management tools of your operating system to install pre-built versions of the server. This is often preferred because they integrate well with the existing file system layout and with other vendor-provided packages. It is, however, important to know how to build your own version of Apache from source code. This will allow you, for example, to build a server customized to your needs as well as to quickly apply security patches as they are released.

The first step is to visit the http://httpd.apache.org website and download the appropriate source tarball. When referring to 1.3-specific functionality, the rest of the book assumes you installed Apache 1.3.33. That is the most recent version in the 1.3 series at the time of this writing. The source tarball will be named apache_1.3.33.tar.gz.

You can now uncompress, configure, compile, and install Apache with the commands in the preceding listing.

The option --prefix indicates the path under which the server will be installed and --enable-shared=max activates loadable module support. Loadable module support is necessary to extend or customize the functionality later on without having to recompile the server.

Note

You may find Apache releases with a .tar.bz2 ending. This means that they were compressed with the bzip2 tool. While slower to compress and decompress, this format can reduce the size of the distribution files and is now commonly used by many open source projects. To decompress this kind of file, you can do one of the following on most modern Linux systems:

bunzip2 < apache_1.3.33.tar.bz2 | tar xvf - tar xvfj apache_1.3.33.tar.bz2