Install Apache Web Server On Ubuntu 20.04 / Linux & Manage It

Hello! In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Apache, Manage it & Create Virtual Hosts in Ubuntu 20.04. Apache web server is the most widely used web server in the market.

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Prerequisites

Before moving ahead with this article I request you guys to setup up Ubuntu 20.04 server in Digital Ocean, Linode or any other cloud platform. If you don't have an account then click on the link and get the free credits to play around :)

You might be interested in securing your server after initial installation How To Do Basic Server Security Setup For Ubuntu / Linux.

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Step 1 - Install Apache Web Server

First & foremost thing after logging into your server is to update the Ubuntu server packages so that the latest packages are available.

sudo apt update

Now install apache2 Web Server

sudo apt install -y apache2

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Step 2 - Check The Apache Web Server Status

Now after you have installed your apache2 web server by default it will be running as system process.

To check the status of the apache2 server use the following service command

sudo service apache2 status

or using systemctl command

sudo systemctl status apache2

You will similar to the following output

apache2.service - LSB: Apache2 web server
  Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/apache2; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
 Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service.d
      └─apache2-systemd.conf
  Active: active (running) since Fri 2020-01-31 17:40:55 IST; 3 months 0 days ago
   Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
 Process: 9350 ExecReload=/etc/init.d/apache2 reload (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Tasks: 20
  Memory: 12.5G
   CPU: 1month 2w 4d 9h 30min 45.734s
  CGroup: /system.slice/apache2.service
      ├─22008 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
      ├─22245 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

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Step 3 - Testing In Web Browser

Now to check if your server is running on it. Go to browser and type the server ip_address.

Use the following command in your logged in server to know the server ip_address.

hostname -I

It will return multiple ip_address with white space, try one by one. Most of the time first one will work.

Now with the above ip_address type as follows

http://server_ip_address

You must be able to see the following in your web page

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Step 4 - Manage Apache Web Server

Once you have installed you have to manage it in future. There are 2 ways by which you can manage it with service or systemctl commands.

Start Apache Server

sudo service apache2 start

OR

sudo systemctl start apache2

Stop Apache Server

sudo service apache2 stop

OR

sudo systemctl stop apache2

Restart Apache Server

sudo service apache2 restart

OR

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Disable Auto Start After Reboot

sudo systemctl disable apache2

Enable Auto Start After Reboot

sudo systemctl enable apache2

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Step 5 - Virtual Hosts Management

We use virtual hosts so that we can manage more than 1 website in single server. By default all domains will be pointing to /var/www/html folder.

For the sake of security & managing multiple website you need to point it to /var/www/ folder, which can have projects like /var/www/project_name

We will create first_domain & second_domain to mange it at /var/www folder.

NOTE: Replace first_domain & second_domain with your domains

mkdir -p /var/www/first_domain/

mkdir -p /var/www/second_domain/

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Now assign the main user ownership to first_domain & second_domain with $USER environment variable

For First Domain

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/first_domain

For Second Domain

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/second_domain

Make sure to give the proper file permissions for the project to work properly. Use the following command to allow root user read, write and execute permission and other to read & write permissions

First Domain

chown -R 755 /var/www/first_domain

Second Domain

chown -R 755 /var/www/second_domain

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Create index.html files for the sake of testing

First Domain

sudo nano /var/www/first_domain/index.html

Add the following HTML content it index.html file

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <title>First Domain</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>First Domain Project!</h1>
</body>
</html>

Second Domain

sudo nano /var/www/second_domain/index.html

Add the following HTML content it index.html file

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Second Domain</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Second Domain Project!</h1>
</body>
</html>

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Tell Apache To Server Which Domain Web Pages To Server

Now its time to tell which domain needs to access which project folder files.

Sites Available ( /etc/apache2/sites-available ) - Here we will place all our sites Apache configuration file

Site Enabled (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled) - Here all the enabled apache website configuration resides. This is usually points to sites-available.

By default you will have /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf configuration which will be pointing to /var/www/html/index.html folder file.

First Domain

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/first_domain.conf

And paste the following virtual host config data. The following code will tell that its listening on port 80 pointing to your first_domain which has an alias of ww.first_domain (this is non mandatory). We are storing the error & access logs in the default error & access logs path of apache.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  ServerName first_domain
  ServerAlias www.first_domain
  DocumentRoot /var/www/first_domain/
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Second Domain

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/second_domain.conf

And paste the following virtual host config data. The following code will tell that its listening on port 80 pointing to your second_domain which has an alias of ww.second_domain (this is non mandatory). We are storing the error & access logs in the default error & access logs path of apache.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  ServerName second_domain
  ServerAlias www.second_domain
  DocumentRoot /var/www/second_domain/
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

NOTE: Apache logs exists in /var/log/apache2/ folder

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Enable & Disable The Configurations

Now you have added the configuration files for your server. To tell Apache server to load the changes of new configurations file and disable the default configuration file use the following

First Domain

sudo a2ensite first_domain.conf

Second Domain

sudo a2ensite second_domain.conf

Disable Default Config

sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf

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Check For Configuration Error

To check if the configurations that we have add are all correct use the following command

sudo apache2ctl configtest

You should see the output similar to that of the following

Syntax Ok

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Restart Apache Server

To make configurations take an effect and let apache server load those you need to restart the server with the command

sudo service apache2 restart

OR

sudo systemctl restart apache2

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Testing Your Configurations In Browser

Load http://first_domain in your browser & http://second_domain in your browser to see successful pages.

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Error Debugging

Sometimes you may get 404 page after doing all these. You can do the simple change in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Look for /var/www and change the code to below code

<Directory /var/www/>
	Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
	AllowOverride All
	Require all granted
</Directory>

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Conclusion

In this article you learnt how to setup Apache server, mange it & creating virtual hosts.

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