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I have to start this post by saying that I am by no means a Linux
expert. However, I recently decided to move my web application hosting
off of a Windows Server and onto a Linux (Ubuntu) Server. One portion of my old Windows setup shared the Apache Web Server
binary files to run two separate Apache servers. I have it setup this
way so that I can start/stop each server without taking the other down,
and to ensure that if one crashes it doesn't affect the other.
It
took me some time to figure out how to do this in Ubuntu and I couldn't
find any good tutorials, but it is possible and seems to be running
fairly well. There's always more than one way to skin a cat, but below
I will outline the steps I took to get this running. If any Linux
experts have better suggestions I would more than welcome any comments!
Directory Setup
First, make sure you have Apache2 installed: sudo apt-get install apache2
You
will notice that this will install Apache for you and the configuration
files will be placed under /etc/apache2. You will need to copy this
directory to your own location, such as /customer/server1. Be sure to
use the -r option to recursively copy it. You'll need to do this once
for each instance you want to run.
Before making this copy, I
had noticed is that one of the symbolic links used an absolute path. If
you're not too familiar with symbolic links, this means that after
making a copy, one file would be pointing back to the original
configuration files. This isn't what we want, so we first need to tweak
the symbolic link before copying the directory structure: sudo rm /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
sudo ln -s ../sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
sudo cp -r /etc/apache2 /custom/server1
sudo cp -r /etc/apache2 /custom/server2
Configure Apache
Now
that this is done, you can go into each of your custom directories and
configure Apache however you'd like. Configuring Apache is beyond the
scope of this tutorial, but there are a few important notes:
- The two different instances must be listening on different ports or IP addresses (try editing the ports.conf file)
- Browse
through all the different configuration files and make sure that you
change any references from /etc/apache2 to /custom/server1 (or your own
location)
- In the apache2.conf file, make sure that each instances uses its own lock and pid files. I changed two lines for each instance:
LockFile /var/lock/apache2/accept-server1.lock
PidFile /var/run/apache2-server1.pid
Starting/Stopping Apache
You
can start/stop the different Apache instances by passing in an argument
that specifies the configuration file to use. To start a particular
Apache instance you can do this: sudo apache2 -f /custom/server1/apache2.conf -k start
After
starting each instance of Apache, you can attempt to navigate to the
page in your favorite web browser, and it should be working at this
point! To stop them, the command is similar:
sudo apache2 -f /custom/server1/apache2.conf -k stop
Configuring Apache to Start on Bootup
In
Linux, it seems there are many different ways to get things running on
startup. The best I can do is outline how I have it setup and hope that
it may work the same for you.
First, I needed to create my own
start/stop script. I named it apache2-server1 and placed it inside the
/etc/init.d/ directory. You'll need to create a similar script for
other instances as well:
#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
start)
sudo apache2 -f /custom/server1/apache2.conf -k start
;;
stop)
sudo apache2 -f /custom/server1/apache2.conf -k stop
;;
esac
exit 0
Then, you need to install this script for startup using this command:
sudo update-rc.d apache2-server1 defaults
Conlusion
That
should be all there is to it! Hopefully these directions work for your
particular distribution, or hopefully you're knowledgable enough with
Linux to adjust it for your needs.
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