Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Setting Up a Unix Server

We can point httpd at our site with the -d flag (notice the full pathname to the site.toddle directory, which will probably be different on your machine):

% httpd -d /usr/www/APACHE3/site.toddle

Since you will be typing this a lot, it’s sensible to copy it into a script called go . This can go in /usr/local/bin or in each local site. We have done the latter since it is convenient to change it slightly from time to time. Create it by typing:

% cat > /usr/local/bin/go
test -d logs || mkdir logs
httpd -f 'pwd'/conf/httpd$1.conf -d 'pwd'
            ^d

^d is shorthand for Ctrl-D, which ends the input and gets your prompt back. This go will work on every site. It creates a logs directory if one does not exist, and it explicitly specifies paths for the ServerRoot directory (-d) and the Config file (-f). The command ' pwd ' finds the current directory with the Unix command pwd . The back-ticks are essential: they substitute pwd’s value into the script — in other words, we will run Apache with whatever configuration is in our current directory. To accomodate sites where we have more than one Config file, we have used ...httpd$1... where you might expect to see ...httpd... The symbol $1 copies the first argument (if any) given to the command go . Thus ./go 2 will run the Config file called httpd2.conf, and ./go by itself will run httpd.conf.

Remember that you have to be in the site directory. If you try to run this script from somewhere else, pwd’s return will be nonsense, ...