Category: Web Servers Scrippting and Databases
Posted by: spyhwearslayer
Ok so why would you want to do this and what will you need to do so?
To answer the question you will need a web server if you want to test any web pages that you write on a local computer.
There are various Web Servers available, but Apache is well recognised, works well, is very popular, and is Free... are you convinced!!
In order to have a web server ofcourse you need a computer to run it on and of course internet access. Preferably broadband, and a little time of course to download the software and install it.
There are a number of versions of Apache and we are at the moment downloading Version 2.2.10 (win32), and am installing it on a machine running Windows Vista Home Premium. You can install it on a computer running Windows XP if you like, we have done this sucessfully....
One problem you may encounter is that you may point your browser to the place where the apache server is and it may not display your web pages, this can be very frustrating and can be caused by several possible reasons, plus can be tricky to fix. We will say more about this below.
Another problem you may encounter is simply down loading the apache Web server sofware, we tried downloading apache web server using Firefox version 3 and discovered that is could not find the mirror to download from. We solved this buy using Internet Explorer version 7, but I think version 6 will work also ok...
An Apache Web Server will effectively serve a page up to a browser, and it is no diffrent when you point a browser at your own machine. However there are a bunch of things, that can easily go wrong, and it is difficult to sort this out...
Here are a few clues..... firstly an apache server will be listening to a particular port. generally Apache listens to port 80. It is possible to configure apache to listen to port 8080 instead, and if you put into the browser the address of the local machine but do not spify the port as well as the url, you may find it doesn't work.
Notice that a server, a web server in this case, running on a local computer will be found at 127.0.0.1, but you may need to specify the port as well as the ip address, you do this by typing http://127.0.0.1:80 notice the colon is separating the ip address from the port.
To answer the question you will need a web server if you want to test any web pages that you write on a local computer.
There are various Web Servers available, but Apache is well recognised, works well, is very popular, and is Free... are you convinced!!
In order to have a web server ofcourse you need a computer to run it on and of course internet access. Preferably broadband, and a little time of course to download the software and install it.
There are a number of versions of Apache and we are at the moment downloading Version 2.2.10 (win32), and am installing it on a machine running Windows Vista Home Premium. You can install it on a computer running Windows XP if you like, we have done this sucessfully....
One problem you may encounter is that you may point your browser to the place where the apache server is and it may not display your web pages, this can be very frustrating and can be caused by several possible reasons, plus can be tricky to fix. We will say more about this below.
Another problem you may encounter is simply down loading the apache Web server sofware, we tried downloading apache web server using Firefox version 3 and discovered that is could not find the mirror to download from. We solved this buy using Internet Explorer version 7, but I think version 6 will work also ok...
An Apache Web Server will effectively serve a page up to a browser, and it is no diffrent when you point a browser at your own machine. However there are a bunch of things, that can easily go wrong, and it is difficult to sort this out...
Here are a few clues..... firstly an apache server will be listening to a particular port. generally Apache listens to port 80. It is possible to configure apache to listen to port 8080 instead, and if you put into the browser the address of the local machine but do not spify the port as well as the url, you may find it doesn't work.
Notice that a server, a web server in this case, running on a local computer will be found at 127.0.0.1, but you may need to specify the port as well as the ip address, you do this by typing http://127.0.0.1:80 notice the colon is separating the ip address from the port.
