This
part of the article deals with letting users on your machine host
their own websites that would be served by the Apache Web Server.
Initially I had mentioned that this article would be aimed at
a single homeuser who is using Apache Web Server for development
purposes on his home computer. But since you are not supposed
to be working as the superuser for your general Linux work, you
must have most probably created a user account which you use regularly.
So if you want a proper website for development (when logged in
as that user) you would have to set up Apache Web Server as follows
Creating User
Directories For User Homepages
If you want to create separate directories for all your users
then you can define the name of the directory where the users
must put their HTML pages.. Once the users put the pages in that
particular directory, then that users
website can be accessed by typing the following in the browser.
http://127.0.0.1/~username
The directive necessary to enable this in the httpd.conf file
is called
UserDir public_html
The above line would require all users who want to make their
own websites to have a directory named 'public_html' within
their home directory and they should put their html pages
within that directory. Remember that the directory that you specified
in the directive is not a common directory for all users to put
their files. It basically is a name for a directory that the user
must create within his home directory and put his webpages in.
Apache would do all the internal mapping that is required when
the website is asked for.
Also note that you may have to uncomment a few lines in the httpd.conf
file (in case they are commented in the first place) The lines
are generally just below the UserDir directive. They are enclosed
with a <Directory> tag. There are a total of around 10-12
lines. I have just shown you the basic structure of those lines.
Just uncomment these lines, don't change any of these lines.
<Directory /home/*/public_html>
.
.
<Limit>
..
</Limit>
<Limit>
.
.
</Limit>
</Directory>
Uncomment all of the above lines right from <Directory>
upto </Directory>
Example
Suppose there is a user named david then his webpage could be
accessed using the following address http://127.0.0.1/~david
This request would map into the following location /usr/home/david/public_html/
This would be the case if /usr/home/david is the home directory
of the user named david.
Remember that in the above case since a particular filename was
not specifically asked for, Apache would search for the filenames
in the order set by the directive named DirectoryIndex as explained
before (start by searching for a file named index.html.. and then
proceed to search for other named files.)
Important : In case you are using this to create a webpage
for a user, you have to give Enter/Execute permissions for your
Home directory as well as your public_html directory and all other
directories that exist within your website. Execute permissions
must be set for user, group and others. The pages (.html and others)
need to have only read access for user, group and others set.
When you right click on a directory within KDE you get to see
the permissions for that directory. Check the 3rd column. Only
if you do this will you be able to view the pages within that
directory else you would get a ' 403 forbidden error '
stating that you do not have the permissions to view this page.
Checking
Log files to detect any problems
Apache logs all its actions in two files named ' access_log
' and ' error_log '. These files are found in the /var/log/httpd
directory. These can be read by normal users, so you don't have
to be the superuser to check what went wrong in case your webpage
doesn't come up.
The access_log files maintains a note of the IP address from
where a page was requested (makes more sense when you have
Apache serve pages to strangers accessing yourwebpage from other
machines), the exact time the request was made and also the exact
resource that was requested.
The error_log also maintains a detailed list including a description
of the errors that have occurred and the exact time they occurred.
There is a directive in the httpd.conf file that sets the amount
of log that Apache should generate. It is as follows
LogLevel debug
LogLevel accepts various parameters such as debug, info, warn,
crit etc. You can set it as per your choice. Whenever you are
programming and trying out something for the first time its a
good idea to set this as debug level, so that you get a detailed
idea about what exactly is happening behind the scenes.
Goto
Part 2 of this article
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