Книга: Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

Installing Through Pirut

Installing Through Pirut

Although the "Web Server" category was available during install, it's often best to install Fedora clean of any services so that you minimize your attack vectors out of the box. As soon as Fedora is installed, you can use Pirut to add Apache by choosing Web Server from the Servers category.

However, you might find it useful to use the List tab rather than the Browse tab, because all the Apache modules start with "mod" to help you find them easily. Fedora ships with many Apache modules, some of which are discussed in the following sections. However, only a handful are enabled by default — you need to use Pirut to install and activate them.

You can find the Apache RPM on the Fedora installation media, on the Fedora FTP server, or at one of its many mirror sites. Check the Fedora site as often as possible to download updates as they become available. Updated RPM files usually contain important bug and security fixes. When an updated version is released, install it as quickly as possible to keep your system secure.

After you have obtained an Apache RPM, you can install it with the command-line rpm tool by typing the following:

rpm -Uvh latest_apache.rpm

where latest_apache.rpm is the name of the latest Apache RPM.

The Apache RPM installs files in the following directories:

? /etc/httpd/conf — This directory contains the Apache configuration file, httpd.conf. See the section "Configuring Apache for Peak Performance" later in this chapter for more information.

? /etc/rc.d/ — The tree under this directory contains the system startup scripts. The Apache RPM installs a startup script named httpd for the web server under the /etc/rc.d/init.d directory. This script, which you can use to start and stop the server from the command line, also automatically starts and stops the server when the computer is halted, started, or rebooted.

? /var/www — The RPM installs the default server icons, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs, and HTML files in this location. If you want to keep web content elsewhere, you can do so by making the appropriate changes in the server configuration files.

? /var/www/manual/ — If you've installed the apache-manual RPM, you'll find a copy of the Apache documentation in HTML format here. You can access it with a web browser by going to http://localhost/manual/.

? /usr/share/man — Fedora's Apache RPM also contains man pages, which are placed underneath this directory. For example, the httpd man page is in section 8 of the man directory.

? /usr/bin — Some of the utilities from the Apache package are placed here — for example, the htpasswd program, which is used for generating authentication password files.

? /var/log/httpd — The server log files are placed in this directory. By default, there are two important log files (among several others): access_log and error_log. However, you can define any number of custom logs containing a variety of information. See the "Logging" section, later in this chapter, for more detail.

? /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/ — This directory might contain a tar archive containing the source code for Apache and, in some cases, patches for the source. You must have installed the Apache SRPM for these files to be created.

When Apache is running, it also creates the file httpd.pid, containing the process ID of Apache's parent process in the /var/run/ directory.

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