Linux System Administration

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Chapter 6: Administering Apache

Configuration File Directives

Each Apache configuration file is divided into sections that contain Apache direc-

tives (commands or settings) and their values. Some directives are part of the Apache

core, while only specific modules use others. If a directive refers to a module that you

haven’t configured Apache to use, Apache will fail to start, and a message contain-

ing the incorrect lines will be written to the error log.

After you have Apache running successfully, you can see which Apache directives are

currently usable by typing this command:

# /usr/sbin/apache2 -L

The “Troubleshooting” section at the end of this chapter has step-by-step guidelines

to help you diagnose web server problems.

Assuming the test file worked, you can now turn to configuring Apache. Following

are the contents of the default Apache configuration file, /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

000-default. Sections begin and end with HTML-style tags, such as:

<VirtualHost *>

...

</VirtualHost>

Here’s a copy of the file that we’ve annotated with comment lines:

# Answer to any name or IP address:

NameVirtualHost *

# For any virtual host at any address, any port:

<VirtualHost *>

# If Apache has problems, whom should it contact?

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

# Our web site files will be under this directory:

DocumentRoot /var/www/

# Overall directives, in case we move DocumentRoot

# or forget to specify ...