When you are ready to setup a web server, you need something reliable. You need something with power. You'll also need something that is hard to hack. The Apache Foundation has a great free web server package that is known and used worldwide as the number one solution for web hosting. This tutorial will show you how to setup an Apache + PHP web server that will solve all of your problems.

This is a Linux tutorial. A Windows tutorial may come soon.

Step 1. Obtaining the Source Packages

I always recommend that you compile via source package (tarballs). The reason being is that you have control over what goes into your installation. It's more of the "Advanced" installation where you get to select installation options. Here's some addresses of the sites. I will not post specific files here because they may be updated by the time you read this tutorial:

Make a directory on your linux box called something like "/usr/local/src/webserver" Download these files to here. You may do this via SSH and CD to that directory and type "wget the_url_here" for the respective files.

Apache Web Server - http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/httpd/
Look for the Apache 1.3.2x series. At the time of writing this tutorial, Apache 2 and PHP are not working properly unless you do some massive testing with CVS code, but that's not recommened!

PHP - http://www.php.net/downloads.php
Look for the 4.2.x series under Complete Source Code.



Step 2. Unpacking the Source Packages

Go to the source directory and type:

tar zxvf apache_1.xxxxx.tar.gz
tar zxvf php_4.xxx.tar.gz

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