Installing and configuring Apache
The best way to become familiar with any technology is to dive right in. We'll begin this chapter by installing Apache. But first, what exactly is Apache? For those that aren't already aware, Apache is a popular application that is typically run on Linux and Unix servers to serve web pages to users. It runs in the background, and serves HTML pages to those that request a URL that exists on your server.
Installing Apache is very easy; it's simply a matter of installing the apache2
package:
sudo apt install apache2
By default, Ubuntu will immediately start and enable the apache2
daemon as soon as its package is installed. You can confirm this yourself with the following command:
systemctl status apache2
In fact, at this point, you already have (for all intents and purposes) a fully functional web server. If you were to open a web browser and enter the IP address of the server you just installed Apache on, you should...