Apache Web Server

Apache on Gentoo

• Add the ServerName directive to the main configuration file (httpd.conf)
• To create a virtual host, just create a new file in /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/ with the name starting with 2 digits. For example:

01_images.shoopz.com.conf

• On this file, you just need to define your virtual host, nothing else is required.
• You don't need to duplicate the default_vhost.include which is in fact included from httpd.conf.

webapp-config

• webapp-config is a Gentoo only tool to allow a single web applications to be correctly installed into multiple virtual hosts. This is nice as it allows the code to remain on a standard, Portage managed place while you can easily deploy your web applications into production.

• Currently the way it works is by creating a directory corresponding to the application inside the specified virtual host. By default it will be installed in /var/www/<virtual_host_name>/htdocs; you can configure that by editing /etc/vhosts/webapp-config. I use the following convention:

vhost_root="/srv/${vhost_subdomain_2}.${vhost_subdomain_1}/"
vhost_htdocs_insecure="./"

• In /etc/vhosts/webapp-config, you need to have a vhost_hostname variable that can conform to a fully qualified domain, eg localhost won't work. Put something like "elvanor.net" there.

• The only problem is that webapp-config always creates icons, error, and cgi-bin directories in the virtual host directory if they are not there. I would prefer that not to happen.

• When you need to update a web application, use the -U switch, eg:

webapp-config -U -h elvanor.net -d phpmyadmin phpmyadmin 2.11.5

PHP Support

• The APC module provided by Gentoo (pecl-apc) directly installs the necessary configuration options to use APC right away.
• Note however that pecl-apc-3.0.19 is incompatible with mediawiki-1.11.2. APC must be disabled until a newer version works better with Mediawiki.