Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Setting Up a Win32 Server

There is no point trying to run Apache unless TCP/IP is set up and running on your machine. A quick test is to ping some IP — and if you can’t think of a real one, ping yourself:

>ping 127.0.0.1

If TCP/IP is working, you should see some confirming message, like this:

Pinging 127.0.0.1 with 32 bytes of data: 
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=32
....

If you don’t see something along these lines, defer further operations until TCP/IP is working.

It is important to remember that internally, Windows Apache is essentially the same as the Unix version and that it uses Unix-style forward slashes (/) rather than MS-DOS- and Windows-style backslashes (\) in its file and directory names, as specified in various files.

There are two ways of running Apache under Win32. In addition to the command-line approach, you can run Apache as a “service” (available on Windows NT/2000, or a pseudoservice on Windows 95, 98, or Me). This is the best option if you want Apache to start automatically when your machine boots and to keep Apache running when you log off.