Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

2.5. Setting Up a Win32 Server

There is no point trying to run Apache unless TCP/IP is set up and running on your machine. In our experience, if it isn't, Apache will crash Windows 95. 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 collaborative message like:

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 several ways of running Apache under Win32. Under NT, you can run it as a service, operating in the background. First you have to install it as a service by running the "Install Apache as a Service" option from the Start menu. Alternatively, click on the MS-DOS prompt to get a DOS session window. Go to the /Program Files/Apache directory (or wherever else you installed Apache) with:

>cd "\Program Files\apache"
         

Apache can be installed as an NT service with:

>apache -i
         

and uninstalled with:

>apache -u
         

Once this is done, you can open the Services window in the Control Panel, select Apache, and click on Start. Apache then runs in the background until you click ...