Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 22 LEOPARD AS A WEB SERVER
Open httpd.conf in your text editor of choice. I personally recommend using BBEdit, or its
free equivalent, TextWrangler. With BBEdit, you can use the disk browser to easily navigate here,
since it can see the hidden folders. It will also take care of overwriting the old file, which is readonly.
That said, you can also use Nano, Emacs, or Vi, as detailed in Chapter 18.
The configuration file is very long, but don’t be scared. Lines that start with the pound sign
are comments, which is to say they are ignored. The file mainly consists of hints explaining what
the various sections do. There’s very little actual content here, and even less you have to worry
about.
ServerRoot
Much as UNIX considers ~ to be a shortcut for your user directory, the ServerRoot command tells
Apache where it should look for any files that are not explicitly named. Since these files are all
for its internal use, there’s really no need to change the default value.
Listen
Like any server process, Apache listens on a particular port or socket. Normally, it answers any
incoming calls on port 80. If you need to change the port for some reason, or you want to bind
to a specific IP address, you can edit this.
One particular use for Listen is to limit who can see your page. Remember how I said you
could load your page by one of several means? What if you don’t want people to be able to load
your page elsewhere on the network? By binding Apache to 127.0.0.1:80, you will only be able
to view the page locally. Dialing in to the actual IP address would simply return an error page.
Another use for the Listen directive is to use a port other than the default. For example,
your ISP may block access to port 80 in an effort to prevent you from running a web server from
your home. You could instead bind to port 8080.
You can bind to multiple ports and sockets by issuing multiple Listen directives. So, for
example, to view the site locally on the standard port, but to let others only see it on a secret
port, you could say this:
Listen 127.0.0.1:80
Listen 1984
You could then load your site by simply pointing to 127.0.0.1, but someone else on the network
loading your site would get an error unless they knew to append the correct port to the end
of your IP address. So, for example, if your IP address were 10.0.0.1, they would have to point
their browser to http://10.0.0.1:1984.
Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) Support
This is a fancy name for the LoadModule directive. Modules extend the functionality of Apache.
There are several modules loaded by default. We will come back to LoadModule when we are
ready to add PHP to our web server.
User/Group
Since Apache operates on your system, it needs to be able to access files. You could run it as root,
but that would be a security risk. Instead, Apache runs as the user www as part of the group www.
Should you want to change this, you would do that here. Honestly, though, you probably don’t
need to.