Apache is one of the most popular applications used to serve web pages. This article will show you how to set it up with PHP. This article assumes that you have followed the Arch 2007.08 - Setup article.

Install Apache and PHP

We'll be using pacman to install Apache and PHP, so let's sync our packages first.

sudo pacman -Sy

Once we've done this, let's install our packages.

sudo pacman -S apache php

Easy enough, yes?

Configuring Apache

Now we have it installed, let's do some basic configuring.

sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Listen Ports

Apache, by default, listens on port 80, as seen by:

Listen 80

If we're not running an SSL site, this will be fine. If you are, you'll need to also put a listen statement for port 443:

Listen 80
Listen 443

User and Group

This controls what user and group that Apache accesses the filesystem as. The default is as follows:

User http
Group http

This will be fine for now.

ServerAdmin

The default isn't a valid email address:

ServerAdmin you@example.com

Change this to your preferred contact email address:

ServerAdmin webmaster@democloudserver.com

ServerName

Apache tries to automatically determine the server, but let's set it up with our hostname. The default is:

#ServerName www.example.com:80

We need to change this to our domain, and remove the comment hash.

ServerName www.democloudserver.com:80

DocumentRoot

Nothing needs to be changed here, but do note that your default web root is /srv/http/, which can differ from other Linux distros which put your web root at /var/www/.

Security

Bu default, Apache on Arch allows directory listings for directories that don't contain an index file. Let's go ahead and turn that off so people and search engines can't browse our directories. Find the following part of the file:

...
<Directory "/srv/http/">
...

After some commented lines, you'll see:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

Go ahead and remove Indexes so that the line looks like this:

Options FollowSymLinks

The other settings can be left at the default for now, but go ahead and read over the rest of the file to familiarize yourself with it.

Turning it on

Now that we're all configured and secured, let's fire it up.

sudo /etc/rc.d/httpd start

If you navigate to your IP address, you should see a 403 Forbidden Warning now. This is good -- this means that Apache is working properly and your directory indexes aren't showing. Since you don't have an index.html file in /srv/http/, it gives a permission error.

Keeping it on

Now that it's up and running, let's make it so that Apache will come back on after a reboot of the server.

sudo vi /etc/rc.conf

Find the line that references daemons...

...
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng iptables network netfs crond sshd)
...

...and add httpd at the end of it. The finished line should look like:

...
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng iptables network netfs crond sshd httpd)
...

Save and exit.

Voila!

Summary

Now that we've set up an Apache server with PHP support, we're ready to go in-depth into the Apache settings, and if needed, set up Virtual Hosts.