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Simon Willison’s Weblog

In praise of Apache documentation

I spent much of today upgrading a distinctly hairy Apache 1.3 server to Apache 2.0 as part of a routine OS upgrade. It certainly wasn’t plain sailing—I still have a few crinkles to iron out—but that’s more down to the weirdness of the existing configuration than any problems with Apache 2.

Apache 2 is a beautifully designed piece of software. The documentation is superb—the migration guide proved invaluable but the real gem was the directive quick reference. Armed with the quick reference and Firefox’s Type Ahead Find the previously inpenetrable httpd.conf file becomes a living tutorial on the wild and wonderful ways of Apache configuration. A wise old sysadmin once told me that the best way of learning Linux is to ls /bin and run man <command> for every command in there—then do the same thing for /sbin, then /usr/bin and so on until you run out of things to read. The same appears to be true of Apache configuration directives.

Posted 2nd March 2004 at 5:11 am

This is In praise of Apache documentation by Simon Willison, posted on 2nd March 2004.

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7 comments

  1. On the learning Linux front I've recently discovered the joy of wandering around info. Very nice.

    Simon - 2nd March 2004 12:30 - #

  2. Agreed, Simon. GNU info pages are the best kept secret about learning GNU software. And they are much easier for a new user to navigate to boot. Of course, nothing really answers questions like reading and understanding the source. But man pages and info pages are a great place to get started.

    Dast - 2nd March 2004 18:13 - #

  3. cd /bin ; man * is probably easier :)

    Sam - 3rd March 2004 02:59 - #

  4. As I tend to be Perl coding another one I use alot is perldoc ( though as most CPAN modules install man pages you can read the documentation that way as well ). But i've found one of the really useful perldoc switches, -m, which displays the module itself for those times you really need to know how something works. Or the POD is sadly lacking.

    Simon Proctor - 3rd March 2004 09:14 - #

  5. ...or at least

    cd /bin; whatis *

    for starters. I'm noting this because geting to man whatis the alphabetical way may take some time. ;o)

    Shot - 3rd March 2004 13:31 - #

  6. Good timing, Simon.

    I'm learning all kinds of things about running a *nix server right now, in preparation for my very own. I had been agonizing over whether to use Apache 1.3* or 2.0*.

    On the one hand, 1.3 has better dead tree literature, more modules, and a looser license. One the other hand 2.0 is the new thing, and a better design.

    And then there's the whole license/fork debacle.

    I think you just helped me decide.

    Jeremy Dunck - 3rd March 2004 19:53 - #

  7. Apache 2.0 is definatly an improvement over 1.3. The biggest gain one can get from it is to use the threaded multi-processing module. Although I would not use that with mod_php.

    felix zaslavskiy - 5th March 2004 05:47 - #

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