Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

The reason we were able to drop a file into /var/www/html/ and view it in our browser was because of the DocumentRoot setting within the main Apache configuration file, which can be seen here:

$ cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | grep ^DocumentRootDocumentRoot "/var/www/html"

The reason we used index.html as the filename, aside from it being convention, was because of the following line:

$ cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | grep "^ DirectoryIndex"    DirectoryIndex index.html

This dictates which file to load when a directory is requested.

While the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file is the default configuration file, we're also able to add additional configuration for websites under the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ directory, as we did in this ...