Setting up the web interface

The Nagios web interface is part of main Nagios sources and binary distributions. Therefore, if you installed Nagios, you will also have the web interface files. The only thing that you need is a web server with CGI and PHP support; in our case, this will be Apache 2 (visit http://httpd.apache.org/ for more details).

Nagios web interface uses CGI (Common Gateway Interface), a standard to generate dynamic websites (visit http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/cgi.html for more details), to work as it is the most commonly offered way to run applications. It also allows a flexible setup in terms of security as CGI binaries can be run as different users from the one the web server is running as.

Nagios web interface also uses additional files such as many static HTML pages and CSS and images. Starting with Nagios 4, PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), a scripting language for web development (see http://php.net/ for more details), is used to aid in configuring...