# Installing Web Server



## Wozzer (Nov 7, 2013)

I've been tasked with setting up a web page running a database in the background which allows my department to log certain activites.

Having no prior experience with creating / setting up a webserver, I'm in a bit of a dark hole - So I have a couple of questions. Any guidance / feedback would be gratefully appreticated.

- I've set up a partition on a drive to store the web files.
First question would be - is this bad practise? Should the web files be on a different drive completely?
The web page won't have a huge amount of activity, so it shouldn't effect the over performance of the other paritions.

- Once installed (Perhaps i'm jumping the gun!), how would I access the site.
I'm used to using XAMPP - so to access the site would be to simply enter 'localhost'. I assume i'd need to enter the IP address of the drive? That brings me to my next point - as there are several partitions on the drive, how would I direct it to that specific partition?

Apologies for the lengthy and perhaps stupid questions. This is all new to me.


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## Easy Rhino (Nov 8, 2013)

rather than ask you a bunch of questions about your setup i am just going to go ahead and recommend what you do...

1. install CentOS with all desktop applications
 -partition your drive so that you have the majority of data in / . 
2. Apache will already be installed so you just have to turn it on
 - www root located at /var/www/html
3. install MySQL using YUM
 - it will install to /var/lib/mysql
4. You will only be able to use 'localhost' to access the apache instance locally. for those accessing remotely you will need either the hostname or the IP.
 - make sure you turn off iptables


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## alexstone (Nov 22, 2013)

Wozzer what is your OS ?


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## 3rdshiftdj (Nov 28, 2013)

OP, you can symlink from any partition to the root directory of Apache, then browse http://IP/path.  You can also change the Document Root of apache to point anywhere.

for instance:

I symlink `ln -s /other/software /var/www/software`

If I browse to http://SERVER/software, it'll show up.


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