I recently got myself involved in helping with a website for a local club. In order to maintain it, I wanted to set up an Apache instance at home as well.
Luckily, in Ubuntu 9.10, it’s almost all set up by default. The only changes I had to make were to change the DocumentRoot directory and enable server-side includes. Here’s what I did:
Changing the document root
First I edited /etc/apache2/sites-available/default to put my document root in DocumentRoot, and also changed the two directory references that did point to /var/www to my new document root. Then I made sure all the parents of my document root had r+x permission for the Apache user.
Turning on server-side includes
My hosting facility has server-side includes turned on for .html. This is not the best use of resources, but this website doesn’t get enough traffic to make a difference. So I added: AddType text/html .html AddHandler server-parsed .html Option Include (plus whatever options were there before) to the two directories that used to be /var/www and /. After that, I had to enable mod_include with: cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled sudo ln -s ../mods-available/include.load include.load Then restart apache with sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart