Apache for Beginners

Way back when, in the wilds of 1995, there were a great many people who were disgruntled with the state of Web servers. The commercial ones, like Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Server) and Netscape’s family of servers, hadn’t been born yet, and the ones put out by college students – well, they sucked.

But lo! What did the early code jockeys do? They made their own damn Web server. They called it Apache (as in a patchy server, because it had a lot of patches). A patch is just what it sounds like – something to plug holes in your code with. This small group of hackers started a project that would eventually create the most popular Web server software in the world.

Not to give ourselves too much credit, but one of the founders of the Apache project was an engineer at HotWired. Don’t you just love us? If you really want to know more about Apache’s history, there’s a nice narrative on its site.

The brilliance of the Apache group’s scheme lay not just in the fine programming, but in the development model it used. Now it is fashionably called open source.

(A small side note:There are several different flavors of open-source development. Apache’s lets anyone create a commercial product based on its code and doesn’t make them share the results if they don’t want to. If I say this model is “better” than the other schemes, hostile email will no doubt follow this article’s publication. But it may well be.)

So … back to the present.

Why should you care? There’s two reasons:

It’s free. It rocks.

If you want to set up a Web site, there are lots of advantages to having the source code.

Another big advantage to the open-source approach is that Apache has attracted lots of developers around the world. They have made blocks of code known in Apache-land as modules. Many of these modules do things you want. And if you can’t find one you like, you can always write your own. (You’ll need to write them in C, or you could use mod_perl to extend the server in Perl … but I’m drifting.)

Downloading Apache

If you’ve landed on this page, you probably will want to know how to install and configure Apache for yourself. You may need a compiler, but don’t let that scare you; there are lots of precompiled versions of Apache now too. You just need to know where to get them (www.apache.org/dist/).