APACHE
H T T P S e r v e r
COURSE MATERIALS
You can access the course materials via this link
http://goo.gl/LwyPUe
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CONTENTS
• History
• Clients, servers and URLs
• Anatomy of request and response
• HTTP status codes
• Web servers
• Apache HTTP Server components
• Documentation explained
• Directives examples
• .htacess
• Modules
• Virtual hosts
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MODULES
• You can always list the modules currently used by the server. The
command below will display only the modules compiled into
Apache.
$ httpd -l
• To list all modules, both static and shared
$ httpd -m
• To enable module (Ubuntu only!)
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
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LoadModule
Links in the object file or library, and adds to the list of active
Description:
modules
Syntax: LoadModule module filename
Context: server config
Override: Extension
Status: mod_so
Links in the object file or library, and adds to the list of active
Module:
modules
The LoadModule directive links in the object file or library filename and
adds the module structure named module to the list of active modules.
Module is the name of the external variable of type module in the file,
and is listed as the Module Identifier in the module documentation
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IfModule
Encloses directives that are processed conditional on the
Description:
presence or absence of a specific module
Syntax: <IfModule [!]module-file|module-identifier> ... </IfModule>
Context: server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess
Override: All
Status: Core
Module: core
The <IfModule test>...</IfModule> section is used to mark directives that
are conditional on the presence of a specific module. The directives
within an <IfModule> section are only processed if the test is true. If test
is false, everything between the start and end markers is ignored.
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MULTI-PROCESSING MODULES (MPMS)
• Apache 2.x supports pluggable concurrency models, called Multi-
Processing Modules (MPMs). When building Apache, you must
choose an MPM to use.
• The choice of MPM can affect the speed and scalability of the
httpd:
• The worker MPM
• The event MPM
• The prefork MPM
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PREFORK MODULE
• This Multi-Processing Module (MPM) implements a non-
threaded, pre-forking web server.
• Each server process may answer incoming requests, and a
parent process manages the size of the server pool. It is
appropriate for sites that need to avoid threading for
compatibility with non-thread-safe libraries.
• It is also the best MPM for isolating each request, so that a
problem with a single request will not affect any other.
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PREFORK MODULE
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 150
</IfModule>
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WORKER MODULE
• This Multi-Processing Module (MPM) implements a hybrid multi-
process multi-threaded server.
• By using threads to serve requests, it is able to serve a large
number of requests with fewer system resources than a process-
based server.
• It retains much of the stability of a process-based server by
keeping multiple processes available, each with many threads.
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WORKER MODULE
<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
StartServers 2
MinSpareThreads 25
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadsPerChild 25
MaxRequestWorkers 150
</IfModule>
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EVENT MODULE
• The event MPM is threaded like the Worker MPM, but is
designed to allow more requests to be served.
• Run-time configuration directives are identical to those provided
by worker, with the only addition of the
AsyncRequestWorkerFactor.
• KeepAlive may lead to situations where all workers are tied up
and no worker thread is available to handle new work.
• To mitigate this problem, the event MPM does two things:
• it limits the number of connections accepted per process, depending on
the number of idle request workers;
• if all workers are busy, it will close connections in keep-alive state even if
the keep-alive timeout has not expired.
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EVENT MODULE
<IfModule mpm_event_module>
StartServers 2
MinSpareThreads 25
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadsPerChild 25
MaxRequestWorkers 150
AsyncRequestWorkerFactor 2
</IfModule>
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REWRITE MODULE
• The Apache module mod_rewrite is a very powerful and
sophisticated module which provides a way to do URL
manipulations.
• With it, you can do nearly all types of URL rewriting that you may
need. It is, however, somewhat complex, and may be
intimidating to the beginner.
• You need to know:
• How to construct regular expression:
• What is the RewriteRule?
• What is the RewriteCond?
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REGEX VOCABULARY
Character Meaning
. Matches any single character
+ Repeats the previous match one or more times
* Repeats the previous match zero or more times.
? Makes the match optional.
^ Called an anchor, matches the beginning of the string
$ The other anchor, this matches the end of the string.
() Groups several characters into a single unit, and captures
a match for use in a backreference.
[] A character class - matches one of the characters
[^ ] Negative character class - matches any character not
specified
! can be used before a regular expression to negate it
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RewriteRule BASICS
• A RewriteRule consists of three arguments separated by
spaces. The arguments are
1. Pattern: which incoming URLs should be affected by the rule;
2. Substitution: where should the matching requests be sent;
3. [flags]: options affecting the rewritten request.
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RewriteRule BASICS
• The Substitution can itself be one of three things:
• A full filesystem path to a resource
RewriteRule "^/games" "/usr/local/games/web"
This maps a request to an arbitrary location on your filesystem,
much like the Alias directive.
• A web-path to a resource
RewriteRule "^/foo$" "/bar"
If DocumentRoot is set to /var/www/html/, then this
directive would map requests for http://example.com/foo to the
path /var/www/html/bar.
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RewriteRule BASICS
• An absolute URL
RewriteRule "^/product/view$"
"http://site2.example.com/seeproduct.html"
[R]
This tells the client to make a new request for the specified URL.
• The Substitution can also contain back-references to parts of the
incoming URL-path matched by the Pattern. Consider the
following:
RewriteRule "^/product/(.*)/view$"
"/var/web/productdb/$1"
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Rewrite FLAGS
• The behavior of a RewriteRule can be modified by the
application of one or more flags to the end of the rule.
• [NC] flag causes the RewriteRule to be matched in a case-
insensitive manner.
RewriteRule "^puppy.html" "smalldog.html" [NC]
• [R] flag causes a HTTP redirect to be issued to the browser. If a
fully-qualified URL is specified (that is, including
http://servername/) then a redirect will be issued to that
location. Otherwise, the current protocol, servername, and port
number will be used to generate the URL sent with the redirect
• For more flags, see
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/rewrite/flags.html
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Rewrite CONDITIONS
• One or more RewriteCond directives can be used to restrict
the types of requests that will be subject to the following
RewriteRule.
• The first argument is a variable describing a characteristic of the request,
• the second argument is a regex that must match the variable,
• and a third optional argument is a list of flags that modify how the match
is evaluated.
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Rewrite CONDITIONS EXAMPLES
• For example, to send all requests from a particular IP range to a
different server, you could use:
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "^10\.2\."
RewriteRule "(.*)" "http://intranet.example.com$1"
• When more than one RewriteCond is specified, they must all
match for the RewriteRule to be applied.
• For example, to deny requests that contain the word "hack" in
their query string, unless they also contain a cookie containing
the word "go", you could use:
RewriteCond "%{QUERY_STRING}" "hack"
RewriteCond "%{HTTP_COOKIE}" "!go"
RewriteRule "." "-" [F]
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Rewrite CONDITIONS EXAMPLES
• Matches in the regular expressions contained in the
RewriteConds can be used as part of the Substitution in the
RewriteRule using the variables %1, %2, etc.
• For example, this will direct the request to a different directory
depending on the hostname used to access the site:
RewriteCond "%{HTTP_HOST}" "(.*)"
RewriteRule "^/(.*)" "/sites/%1/$1"
If the request was for http://example.com/foo/bar, then %1 would
contain example.com and $1 would contain foo/bar.
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VIRTUAL HOST
• The term Virtual Host refers to the practice of running more than
one web site (such as company1.example.com and
company2.example.com) on a single machine.
• Virtual hosts can be "IP-based", meaning that you have a
different IP address for every web site, or "name-based",
meaning that you have multiple names running on each IP
address.
• The fact that they are running on the same physical server is not
apparent to the end user.
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IP-BASED
• the server must have a different IP address/port combination for each IP-based
virtual host.
<VirtualHost 172.20.30.40:80>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot "/www/vhosts/www1"
ServerName www1.example.com
ErrorLog "/www/logs/www1/error_log"
CustomLog "/www/logs/www1/access_log" combined
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost 172.20.30.50:80>
DocumentRoot "/www/vhosts/www2"
ServerName www2.example.org
ErrorLog "/www/logs/www2/error_log"
CustomLog "/www/logs/www2/access_log" combined
</VirtualHost>
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NAME-BASED
<VirtualHost *:80>
# This first-listed virtual host is also the
default for *:80
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias example.com
DocumentRoot "/www/domain"
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName other.example.com
DocumentRoot "/www/otherdomain"
</VirtualHost>
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VIRTUAL HOST
• Any request that doesn't match an existing <VirtualHost> is
handled by the global server configuration, regardless of the
hostname or ServerName.
• To be accessible by more than one name. use ServerAlias
directive, placed inside the <VirtualHost> section.
ServerAlias example.com *.example.com
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