The first step is to download, configure and install Apache 2, which is the web server software. This is the easiest part of our tutorial. Download the latest version from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi. Choose the mirror nearest to the server you are building. You have an option to choose between 2.2.x series and 2.0.x series, this is up to you. The version you need to download is the “unix source”. Then on command line type something like this, depending on the link you got on this webpage:

cd /root
wget http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/httpd-2.0.59.tar.gz
tar -xvzf httpd-2.0.59.tar.gz
cd httpd-2.0.59
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --enable-deflate --enable-ssl --enable-suexec --with-suexec-caller=apache --with-suexec-docroot=/ --with-suexec-datadir=/www/ --enable-mods-shared=most
make
make install

Of course you may add another configuration parameters you may need for your particular installation. The trick is to make sure to use --enable-deflated to install mod_deflate, which is a plug-in for Apache that enables HTML compression, making your web server to present webpages faster and also to save bandwidth.

Also notice where we installed Apache: /usr/local/apache2

Edit /etc/profile and add :/usr/local/apache2 at the end of the PATH statement.

You will also need to edit /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf to configure your webserver. This configuration procedure, however, isn’t the scope of the present tutorial.

That’s it. Now we need to install and configure MySQL 5. Like we said, this must be done before configuring and installing PHP 5.