Once Apache is installed, you can start and stop the services in two ways:

By default, Apache comes with a tool called Apache Monitor, through which Apache systems can be monitored. The following screenshot shows the Apache services status as green. It means the server is running. If you want to restart the services, you can use the Restart button to do the same.

Another way of recycling Apache is through the services.msc, which can be accessed by clicking Start | Run | services.msc

The services console will open. Click on Apache2.2 services, a services properties console window is displayed. It shows the Start and Stop prompt, and the current status of the server instance, as shown in the following screenshot:

Apache Portable Runtime is an open source project, which is supported by the Apache Foundation software. The main goal of this project is to provide the developer with an API, through which they can code and predict the identical behavior, regardless of different platforms. It eliminates the requirement of additional code dependency for different operating systems. For more information on this project, please visit http://apr.apache.org/.

Tomcat 7 uses APR to provide the capability of scalability, performance, and best collaboration with native technologies.

The Apache Portable Runtime project is again divided into three subprojects, to enhance and simplify the capability of this project. The following figure shows the different subprojects for APR:

APR is a portable runtime library, through which Apache integrates with other native technologies. It is also helpful in resolving the problem of threads and processes. For more information on APR, please visit http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr/trunk/index.html.

Apache Portable Runtime Utility (APR-util) is a companion library for APR. To install this utility, the GCC++ package should be installed to the OS (http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr-util/trunk/).

APR-iconv is a portable implementation of the iconv() library (http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr-iconv/trunk/).

Installation of APR/APR-util

APR/APR-util comes with the source of the Apache package, and they can be found in the following directories as shown in the following screenshot:

• APR: Installdir/srclib/apr
• APR-util: Instaldir/srclib/apr-util

As we have extracted the source in /opt/httpd-2.2.19, the source directory is also found in the same directory.

Let's start with the installation of APR, followed by the installation of APR-util.

The APR installation can be done in three steps using three commands. The steps are as follows:

1. Enter the source directory of apr and apr-util, then configure the code using the following commands:

   [root@localhost srclib]# cd /opt/httpd-2.2.19/srclib/apr
   [root@localhost apr]# ./configure --prefix=/opt/httpd/apr-httpd/
   [root@localhost apr-util]# /configure --prefix=/usr/local/apr-util-httpd/ --with-apr=/usr/local/apr-httpd/
   Make
   Make install
   

   Note

   The APR/APR-util installation should be done first, if we are compiling the source code of Apache manually. If we miss installing APR/APR-util, then at the make command execution for Apache, source will produce an error.

2. You can configure Apache using the following command. The following screenshot shows the output of the command when executed:

   [root@localhost httpd-2.2.19]#./configure --with-included-apr --prefix=/opt/apache-2.2.19
   

   
   
3. The previous screenshot describes the progress of the configure command. Once the command is executed, it will get the return code 0 otherwise you will see an error on the screen. Then, run the make command on the server to compile the code. The following figure shows the output of the make command:

   [root@localhost httpd-2.2.X]#make
   

   

   Tip

   It is very important to check the output of the make command, as it gives an error most of the times.

   
4. The previous and the following screenshots show the completion without any error. To proceed with the installation of make, we have to run the following command:

   [root@localhost httpd-2.2.X]#make install
   

   
5. The previous command installs the Apache HTTP on the server, as shown in the following screenshot. It shows the completion on the server. If you view the previous screenshot, you will find that it creates the directory structure, files, manpage and htdocs, as shown in the next screenshot:
   
6. After the make install is complete, the directory structure of the Apache HTTP server is created in the current path of the installation. Let's quickly see how the directory looks. The following screenshot shows the directory structure of the Apache HTTP server. In 90 percent of cases, Apache administrators work on the conf, modules, and htdocs directories for performing day-to-day operations.
   
7. Before we end the installation, it is necessary to start the services of HTTP to verify the instance is properly installed. The best way to check the configuration is by running the configtest script. This script comes by default with Apache httpd, only in a non-DOS environment. The script can be found in APACHE_HOME/bin.

[root@localhost bin]# ./apachectl configtest
Syntax OK

• Then restart Apache using the following command:

[root@root@localhost bin]# ./apachectl start

• Once you start Apache, it's very important to verify the instance status. You can verify the system using the ps command:

ps -ef |grep httpd

The previous screenshot shows the status of the HTTP process, this means the HTTP server is running properly.

Note

We can directly install the Apache package in Debain Linux (Ubuntu), using the apt-get command. The following command shows the syntax for the installation:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Also, you can install the Apache using the yum utility. This utility is used mainly in CentOS using the command:

yum -y install httpd