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Overview

Apache HTTP Server is an open source and cross-platform web server released under the terms of the Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by open community developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.

In June 2017, 92% of the instances of the server program ran on Linux systems. Support for non-Unix operating systems has already been improved in version 2.0. Earlier versions of Apache even ran on OpenVMS and Netware.

Originally based on NCSA's HTTPd server, development began at the beginning of 1995 after NCSA's development stopped. Apache played a key role in the spread of the World Wide Web, quickly overtaking NCSA HTTPd as the dominant HTTP server, and 1996 the most popular web server since April. 2009 was the first web server to serve more than 100 million web pages. As of March, 2018 is estimated to serve 43% of all active web pages and 37% of the one million largest webpages.

According to the FAQ on the Apache project website, the name Apache was chosen out of respect for the Apache Indian tribe because of their excellent abilities in warfare and strategy. At the same time, this name was considered a pun based on "the patchy Server," suggesting that the server was initially updated with patches created by webmasters.

functions

Apache has a number of features, some of which act as compiled modules, extending its basic capabilities from support for server-side programming languages ​​to authentication modules. The language interface supports, for example, Perl, Python, and PHP programming languages, and the more popular authentication modules are mod_access, mod_auth, mod_digestand mod_auth_digest. Other features include Secure Sockets Layer, Transport Layer Security (mod_ssl), the proxy module (mod_proxy), that is URL rewriting module (mod_rewrite), custom log files (mod_log_config) and filtering support (mod_include and mod_ext_filter).

One of the popular compression methods in Apache is mod_gzip (an external plug-in), which is used to reduce the size of web pages served over HTTP. THE ModSecurity open source intrusion detection and prevention engine for web applications. Apache logs can be analyzed through a browser using free scripts such as AWStats, W3Perl or Visitors.

Virtual hosting allows an Apache installation to serve multiple different websites simultaneously.

Apache can also be used to share arbitrary files by copying the files you want to share to Apache document root directory.

HTTP Server Features

Some important server features for Apache include:

• Dynamically loading modules
• Multi-Processing Modules (MPMs)
• Highly scalable (handles more than 10.000 parallel connections)
• .htaccess support
• Reverse proxy support
• Dynamic configurability
• SSL / TLS aid
• IPv6 compatibility
• HTTP / 2 protocol support
• Finely tunable authentication and authorization controls
• GZIP compression support
• URL rewriting function
• CGI aid
• XML support
• FTP aid
• etc. ...