Getting started with the Apache HTTP server

The Apache Software Foundation has a plethora of open source software projects. Their HTTP server is probably the most well-known. Oftentimes, when people hear the Apache web server being mentioned, they automatically associate it with Linux, and while that may be the overwhelmingly largest platform on which it can be found, it also runs on Windows.

The Apache server is frequently paired with the MySQL database engine and the PHP scripting language. In fact, this is so common that these parts are often packaged together. When discussing these on the Linux platform, it's call Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP); on Windows, it's called WAMP. We won't be using MySQL or PHP, so when you're looking at download options, note that these packages will contain more than what we will work with in this book. However, if you have the time and curiosity, feel free to install this suite of tools and explore – there are many...