Many of the content sites (blogs, news sites) that you see these days have a specific url for each page. Eg. News.com

Many of the sites have something like /news/75-news-title.html. You can't have a actual distinct page for each content. The most common solution to this is URL Rewrite the content.

Long before anything like web.config or web.xml was used/invented, Apache had this wonderful file ".htaccess"

This file as you would expect, is a file to control the Web Application's behaviour. The possibilities with this file are endless... from Password Protected Directories to Complex URL Rewrites, All can be done using this file.

You can make a domain run on a different port than 80, which is the default port of HTTP, in the previous examples of VirtualHost Configurations, I'ven't specified the port, which implicitly is 80.

VirtualHosts
The most important part of setting Apache is setting the hosts, or VirtualHosts. The term "VirtualHost" comes from the fact that one single host or comptuer is hosting many hostnames. Apache was the one to start of with this type of hosting, in this Apache picks up the Host header from a standard HTTP request to translate the website associated for that host. This type of hosting is known as the Name-based virtual hosting, which is the most common of all the hosting types. The other one is the IP-based hosting which requires each domain to have a separate IP.

The httpd.conf file is the main configuration file of Apache. It rests in "apache-install-dir/conf"

Now lets take a look at some important and useful parameters

ServerName
This is param sets the default server name, it should generally be the FQDN or the Fully Qualified Domain Name of the machine, or the IP, if the machine doesn't have any FQDN.

For guys who have reached here, but still don't know what httpd is,
Apache is a web server, For all the web pages, websites, blogs, image galleries that are hosted on the web, there needs to be server who "serves" these documents (pages, images, files) to the client (the user's browser)

Welcome to the Apache section!

This is my favourite one, Apache is the best and probably the most popular software on the Web. It runs over any other web-servers with its popularity, support and its stability, scalability and ... words are just not enough.

Here you'll be getting serveral tips ranging from

• Configuration
• Rewrite Engine: mod_rewrite
• Access, Authorization, etc..