Chapter 17
Configuring a Web Server
Web servers are responsible for serving up the content you view on the Internet every day. By far, the most popular web server is the Apache (HTTPD) web server that is sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation (http://apache.org). Because Apache is an open source project, it is available with every major Linux distribution, including Fedora, RHEL, and Ubuntu.
You can configure a basic web server to run in Linux in just a few minutes. However, there are a tremendous number of ways you can configure your Apache web server. You can configure an Apache web server to serve content for multiple domains (virtual hosting), provide encrypted communications (HTTPS), and secure some or all of a website using different kinds of authentication.
This chapter takes you through the steps to install and configure an Apache web server. These steps include procedures for securing your server, as well as using a variety of modules so you can use different authentication methods and scripting languages on your web server. Then, I describe how to generate certificates to create an HTTPS Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) website.
Understanding the Apache Web Server
Apache HTTPD (also known as the Apache HTTPD Server) provides the service with which the client web browsers communicate. ...
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