A quick guide to learn how to install Apache HTTP Server on Linux environment

Apache is the most popular web servers and if you are working as System Administrator then it’s very likely that you will not cross the path to Apache HTTP.

This is not typical yum installation instead download the source code and compile on your Linux environment.

Let’s get it started with the download and installation procedure.

Download Apache HTTP

  • We will use the latest Apache Web Server stable available version 2.4.6 on Centos 6.3 OS in this article.
  • Download Apache 2.4.6 version from https://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
  • Let’s download to /opt/apache folder
  • Once downloaded, you should have httpd-2.4.6.tar.gz

Installing Apache HTTP

We will install Apache under /opt/apache directory with mod_ssl enabled.

Requirements

  • ANSI-C compiler and Build system – ensure you have GCC or CC compiler installed on your server and set in PATH. You can install GCC with yum as following.
# yum install gcc
  • Apr/apr-util – ensure you have apr/apr-util 1.2 installed on your server.
  • OpenSSL – ensure you have the latest OpenSSL version on your server. You can install OpenSSL with yum as following.
# yum install openssl
  • Let’s extract the downloaded file under /opt/apache by executing the command
# gunzip –c httpd-2.4.6.tar.gz | tar xvf –
  • Now you could see it has extracted everything into new folder httpd-2.4.6
  • Go to httpd-2.4.6 folder
  • Let’s compile and install the Apache source code
# ./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/apr/bin/apr-1-config --prefix=/opt/apache/ --enable-ssl --enable-so
# make
# make install

Let’s understand the configured syntax in a better way.

  • –with-apr= instructs to use a specified apr configuration file
  • –prefix= Provide the location where you wish to install, in this example Apache, will be installed under /opt/apache
  • –enable-ssl this will compile apache with SSL enabled so can secure Apache web server with SSL cert.
  • –enable-so to enable shared modules

Upon successful compilation, you could see Apache is installed under /opt/apache as following.

Now, we can delete httpd-2.4.6.tar.gz and httpd-2.4.6 folder from this location, as these are no longer required.

# rm –rf httpd-2.4.6.tar.gz httpd-2.4.6

Next, you may be interested in securing them.