Install Apache on Ubuntu Server 13.10

First you need to prepare the machine that you are going to use. I’m using a Rackspace cloud server. In which case, all I need to do is spin up a server and update the Operating System software.

Install Apache2

Installing Apache is easy, simply run apt-get install apache2 as the root user.

root@apache:~# apt-get install apache2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  apache2-bin apache2-data libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap ssl-cert
Suggested packages:
  www-browser apache2-doc apache2-suexec-pristine apache2-suexec-custom apache2-utils openssl-blacklist
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  apache2 apache2-bin apache2-data libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
  ssl-cert
0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1,302 kB of archives.
After this operation, 5,314 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 

Once the installation has finished, open up a web browser and enter the IP address into the address bar. Hopefully you should see a page like the below.

And that’s it! Apache is now installed and working!

Set the Hostname

Your likely to see the below error message.

AH00558: apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 2a00:1a48:7806:117:936d:610a:ff08:747d. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message
                                                                                                  [ OK ]

This is caused by the hostname not being set correctly. Open up /etc/hosts and enter something similar to the below, adjusting for your own environment.

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
127.0.0.1 www.yourdomain.co.uk www localhost

2a00:1a48:7806:0117:936d:610a:ff08:747d	www.yourdomain.co.uk www
162.13.144.164	www.yourdomain.co.uk www
10.180.66.169	www.yourdomain.co.uk www

If you too are using a Rackspace cloud server, the most important line is shown below.

2a00:1a48:7806:0117:936d:610a:ff08:747d	www.yourdomain.co.uk www

This will stop the warning message.