Install and configure a WEB server

UBUNTU 22.04

ESPRIT 2023/2024
Requirements:
• A newly installed Ubuntu 22.04
• Internet connection
• root privilege

Goals:
• Install Apache Web server
• Set up name based virtual host
• Set up IP based virtual host
• Set up port based virtual host

Introduction :
The Apache web server is a popular method for serving websites on the internet. As of
2019, it is estimated to serve 29% of all active websites and it offers robustness and
flexibility for developers. Using Apache, an administrator can set up one server to host
multiple domains or sites off of a single interface or IP by using a matching system.
Each domain or individual site — known as a “virtual host” — that is configured using
Apache will direct the visitor to a specific directory holding that site’s information. This is
done without indicating that the same server is also responsible for other sites. This
scheme is expandable without any software limit as long as your server can handle the
load. The basic unit that describes an individual site or domain is called a virtual host.
How to set up Apache virtual hosts on an Ubuntu 22.04 server. During this process,
you’ll learn how to serve different content to different visitors depending on which
domains they are requesting using Name Based, IP Based ans Port Based virtual hosts.
The World Wide Web commonly known as the web is a system of interlinked hypertext
documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that
may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via
hyperlinks.

❖ HTTP protocol :

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed,

collaborative, hypermedia information systems.
HTTP functions as a request-response protocol in the client-server computing model. A
web browser, for example, may be the client and an application running on a computer
hosting a web site may be the server. The client submits an HTTP request message to
the server.

❖ Port numbers :

A port is associated with an IP address of the host, as well as the type of protocol used
for communication. The purpose of ports is to uniquely identify different applications or
processes running on a single computer and thereby enable them to share a single
physical connection to a packet-switched network like the Internet.
By default, HTTP uses port 80 and HTTPS uses port 443, but a URL like
http://www.example.com:8080/path/ specifies that the web resource be served by the
HTTP server on port 8080.

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INSTALL APACHE ON UBUNTU 22.04

You will need to have Apache installed in order to work through these steps. If you
haven’t already done so, you can get Apache installed on your server through
the apt package manner:

I. SET UP NAME BASED VIRTUAL HOST

I.1. Create the directory structure :

The first step that you are going to take is to make a directory structure that will hold the
site data that you will be serving to visitors.
Your document root (the top-level directory that Apache looks at to find content to serve)
will be set to individual directories under the /var/www directory. You will create a
directory here for both of the virtual hosts you plan on making.
Within each of these directories, you will create a public_html folder that will hold your
actual files. This gives you some flexibility in your hosting.

I.2. Grant permissions :

Now you have the directory structure for your files, but they are owned by your root user.
If you want our regular user to be able to modify files in your web directories, you can
change the ownership

You should also modify your permissions to ensure that read access is permitted to the
general web directory and all of the files and folders it contains so that pages can be
served correctly:

Your web server should now have the permissions it needs to serve content, and your
user should be able to create content within the necessary folders.

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I.3. Create Demo Pages for each Virtual Host

For demonstration purposes, you’ll make an index.html page for each site.
Let’s begin with esprit1.com. You can open up an index.html file in a text editor, in this
case you’ll use gedit:

Within this file, create an HTML document that indicates the site it is connected to, like
the following:

Do the same thing for Esprit2 

I.4. Create new Virtual Host files

Virtual host files are the files that specify the actual configuration of your virtual hosts and
dictate how the Apache web server will respond to various domain requests.
Apache comes with a default virtual host file called 000-default.conf that you can use as
a jumping off point. You are going to copy it over to create a virtual host file for each of
your domains.
You will start with one domain, configure it, copy it for our second domain, and then
make the few further adjustments needed. The default Ubuntu configuration requires that
each virtual host file end in .conf.

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Start by copying the file for the first domain:

Open the new file in your editor with root privileges:

With comments removed, the file will look similar to this:

Do the same thing for Esprit2 

I.5. Enable the new Virtual Host Files :

Now that you have created your virtual host files, you must enable them. Apache
includes some tools that allow you to do this.
You’ll be using the a2ensite tool to enable each of your sites.

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Next, disable the default site defined in 000-default.conf:

When you are finished, you need to restart Apache to make these changes take effect to
verify the success of the restart.

I.6. Set UP local hosts File

If you haven’t been using actual domain names that you own to test this procedure and
have been using some example domains instead, you can at least test the functionality
of this process by temporarily modifying the hosts file on your local computer.

This will intercept any requests for the domains that you configured and point them to
your VPS server, just as the DNS system would do if you were using registered domains.
This will only work from your local computer though, and only for testing purposes.

The details that you need to add are the IP address of your server followed by the
domain you want to use to reach that server.
Use your IPv4 address instead of <192.168.200.132>

This will direct any requests for esprit1.com and esprit2.com on our computer and send
them to our server. This is what we want if we are not actually the owners of these
domains in order to test our virtual hosts.

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I.7. Test your Results :

Now that you have your virtual hosts configured, you can test your setup by going to the
domains that you configured in your web browser:

II. SET UP IP BASED VIRTUAL HOST

To setup IP based virtual hosting, you must have more than one IP address assigned to
your server or your Linux machine.
It can be on a single NIC card , For example: ens33:1, ens33:2, ens33:3 … so forth.
Multiple NIC cards can also be attached.

Now, check that you have two IP Address with « Ifconfig » command

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As you can see in above output, two IPs 192.168.200.132 (ens33) and 192.168.200.133
(ens33:1) is attached to the server, both IPs are assigned to the same physical network
device (ens33).
Now, assign a specific IP to receive http requests, you can simply do it by changing the
directive in /etc/apache2/sites-available/esprit3.com.conf file.

Note : don’t forget to enable the new virtual machine, to create a new directory and the
testing page (index.html) for the new web site www.esprit3.com
Don’t forget to add esprit3.com in the /etc/hosts file.

Check the result :

III. SET UP PORT BASED VIRTUAL HOST

The default port number for HTTP is 80. However, most webservers can be configured to
operate on almost any port number, provided the port number is not in use by any other
program on the server.
For example, a server may host the website www.esprit2.com. However, if the owner
wishes to operate a second site, and does not have access to the domain name
configuration for their domain name, and/or owns no other IP addresses which could be
used to serve the site from, they could instead use another port number, for example,
www.esprit.com:8080 for port 8080.

Open Apache main configuration file with your chosen editor and add listen 8080
parameter

Add the following virtual directive at the bottom of the file. Save and close the file.

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In /etc/apache2/sites-available/esprit4.com.conf file, specify parameters like bellow :

Note : don’t forget to enable the new virtual machine, to create a new directory and the
testing page (index.html) for the new web site www.esprit4.com
Don’t forget to add esprit4.com in the /etc/hosts file.

Check the result :

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