Linux Apache SSL PHP/FI frontpage mini-HOWTO: Introduction

Before you start reading: I am not a native speaker, so there are probably spelling/grammatical errors in this document. Feel encouraged to inform me of mistakes.

1.1 Description of the components

The webserver you hopefully will get after having read this howto is composed of several parts, the original apache sources with some (well, many) patches and some external executables. I recommend using the software versions I tried, they will probably compile without greater problems and result in a fairly stable daemon. If you are courageous, you can try to compile all the latest-stuff-with-tons-of-new-features, but don't blame me if something fails ;-). However, you may report other working configurations to be included in future versions of this document. All of the steps were tested on a linux 2.0.35 box, so the howto is somewhat linux-specific, but you should be able to use it for other unixes as well.

You do not necesserily have to compile in all components. I tried to structure this howto so that you can skip the parts you are not interested in.

The document is neither a user manual to Apache, SSL, PHP/FI nor frontpage. Its prime intention is to save webservice providers some headaches when installing their server and to do my little contribution to the linux community.

PHP is a scripting language that supports dynamic HTML pages. It is a bit like Apache's SSI, but by far more complex and has database modules for many popular dbs. The GD libraries are needed by PHP.

SSL is an implementation of Netscape's Secure Socket Layer that allow secure connections over insecure networks, e.g. to transmit credit card numbers to web based forms.

frontpage is a wysiwyg web authoring tool that makes use of some server-specific extensions called webbots. Some people think frontpage is cool because you can create feedback forms and discussion webs without having to know a bit about html or cgi. It even protects the designer from uploading his/her site via ftp by using a builtin publisher. If you wish to support frontpage but do not like to setup a windows server, the apache server extensions are your choice.

1.2 Working configurations

Though this document has been downloaded some 100 times since I published it, I received only little feedback. In particular, noone told me of other working combinations. Combinations that work for me are: