| SUSE LINUX Documentation Part IX. Services / Chapter 46. The Apache Web Server | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | 45.7. For More Information | 46.2. Installation |  | |
| SUSE LINUX Documentation Part IX. Services / Chapter 46. The Apache Web Server | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 45.7. For More Information | 46.2. Installation | | |
Table of Contents
Abstract
With a share of more than 60%, Apache is the world's most widely-used Web server according to http://www.netcraft.com. For Web applications, Apache is often used on Linux, with the database MySQL, and the programming languages PHP and Perl. This combination is commonly referred to as LAMP.
This chapter introduces the Web and application server software Apache in version 2.x. Installation and configuration of Apache are explained here, along with the usage of some of the available modules.
This section provides definitions of frequently used terms, both Web-related and particular to Apache.
![[Important]](admon/important.png) | Terminology |
|---|---|
In this document, the term Apache refers to Apache in version 2.x. For documentation on Apache 1.x, see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/. | |
A Web server delivers Web pages requested by a client. The client can be a Web browser, such as Konqueror, or any other device that can connect to the World Wide Web. These pages can be stored as a whole on disk (static pages) or generated in response to a query (dynamic pages) of an external entity, such as a database or a Web service.
Communication between the client and the Web server takes place using the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). The current version, HTTP 1.1, is documented in RFC 2068 and in the update RFC 2616. These RFCs are available at http://www.w3.org.
URL stands for universal resource locator. Clients use URLs, such as http://www.example.com/index.html, to request pages from the server. A URL consists of:
Frequently-used protocols:
In this example, the domain is
www.example.com. The domain
is the name that corresponds to an IP address. Thus,
www.example.com maps uniquely to an IP address
like 123.456.789.1. In turn, the number uniquely identifies the
computer running a Web server. The mapping of a domain name to an IP
address is commonly referred to as name
resolution. The domain can
be subdivided into several parts, here: www,
example, and com. The last part
of the domain name is the top
level domain (TLD). In this example, com is the
TLD. TLD represents the top level of the name resolution process.
TLDs can be generic (gTLDs, such as com,
org, and net) or country-specific
(ccTLDs, such as de for Germany). All parts of a
domain together are referred to as the fully qualified domain name
(FQDN).
In this example, the resource is index.html. This
part specifies
the full path to the resource. The resource can be a file, as in this
example. However, it can also be a CGI script, a JavaServer page, or
some other resource.
The responsible Internet mechanism, such as the domain name system (DNS)
forwards the query to the domain www.example.com
to one or several computers holding the resource. Apache then delivers
the actual resource, in this example, the page
index.html, to the client. In this case, the file
is located in the top level directory. However, resources can also be
located in subdirectories, as in
http://www.example.com/linux/novell/suse.
