Short introduction to web application development
The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards. The Apache HTTP Server was launched in 1995 and it has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996. It celebrated its 20th birthday as a project in February 2015. The Apache HTTP Server is a project of The Apache Software Foundation.
The Apache HTTP server is known as a
httpd package in Fedora. You will probably have this package already installed on your Fedora system but in case you do not have it, install it with this command:
sudo dnf install httpd
To start the Apache server at each boot, type:
sudo systemctl enable httpd.service
To run the Apache server immediately, type:
sudo systemctl start httpd.service
To try if your Apache server is running, visit your localhost page at http://localhost.
If everything goes as expected, you will see the Fedora Test Page:
The root directory of your web server is now situated at
WARNING: The owner of this directory is the root user!
To disable rendering the Fedora Test Page, comment out all the lines in
After that, create an
index.html file with your customized content in the
/var/www/html/ directory, for example:
<html> <head> <title>Hello world</title> </head> <body> Hello world! </body> </html>
Now, when you visit http://localhost, you will see your new index page.
The main server configuration file is situated at
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Here you can change the server root directory, server admin contact, supported file extension for the index file (e.g., .htm, .php, .aspx and so on; you have to install the packages which support your selected file extension) and many other things. For everything that you can set in this file, visit the official Apache getting started or documentation page.
To apply the new server settings, reload apache and restart httpd.service:
sudo apachectl reload sudo systemctl restart httpd.service