Building and Installing Apache 2.0 Page 3

user@host> ./configure [--prefix install-dir] [--with-mpm=MPM]

The first step, ./buildconf, creates the ./configure script. This script finds all of the config.m4 files in the Apache tree, and creates the configure.in script. Buildconf also runs Autoconf and Autoheader on the configure.in file. Autoconf creates the ./configure script, and Autoheader generates the include/ap_config.h.in file. This file is used in the next step to help configure Apache 2.0. After creating the top-level configure script, Buildconf switches to the APR subdirectory, and runs its Buildconf script. This script runs Autoconf and Autoheader on APR's configure.in file. This creates a second ./configure and a new file, src/apr/include/apr_private.h.in. These files are also used in configuring Apache. Finally, APR's buildconf script switches to the src/lib/apr/shmem/unix/mm subdirectory and runs autoconf in this directory. This creates MM's ./configure script, which is the final subconfigure script used configuring the Apache server.

The second step actually configures the server. I have included the most common arguments to ./configure, but there are many more. To determine what all of the arguments are, run ./configure --help. This will provide a list of all of the arguments and a little documentation about each argument. There is not much more documentation, but it will be written before Apache 2.0 is finally released. The two arguments detailed above determine where Apache will be installed and which MPM will be compiled. There is one other argument that is very useful for developers, "--with-maintainer-mode". This argument configures Apache to use very restrictive settings when compiling Apache.

Building Apache

To build Apache, run make;make install. This is self explanatory. The first step builds Apache, and the second installs it into the directory specified in the configure command.

Configuring Apache 2.0

When Apache is installed it is a full installation. This includes a sample configuration file and an index.html file in multiple languages. To test that everything is working, we can now start Apache 2.0 and request a page. The default configuration uses port 80, which means you can only start Apache if you are logged in as root and you have no other web server running on this machine. To change this, change to the directory where Apache 2.0 has been installed and edit the file conf/httpd.conf using your favorite editor. Search for the string:

Port 80

Change the default Port to some value higher than 1024. Save the file and exit the editor. Next run:

bin/httpd

This is slightly different than Apache 1.3. In Apache 1.3 a script called apachectl was automatically installted. This script was able to start, stop, and restart the server. This script has not been written yet for Apache 2.0, so we have to start and stop the server manually. The apachectl script will be included with the final Apache 2.0, and may be included with the next alpha or one of the beta versions.

The server should have been started now. You can determine this by checking the logs/httpd.pid file. If this file is there, the server has been started. If it isn't there, check the error log, logs/error_log. If there is a problem, this file is your best chance to diagnose the problem.