Well, everything seems to be going exceptionally smoothly so far. Time for bed now, but next time I will be installing MySQL. Then once that is set up I should in theory have a test environment to test database driven websites such as Drupal and WordPress. And this will help me on my journey to become a web designer, or as decided today, a web solutions manager. Personally, I feel that hacker is still more apt for my skills. But they are getting there. Although I am not entirely sure what I have learnt this evening, other than with Ubuntu / Linux it is very easy to install Apache and PHP.
Hopefully I will have time to install MySQL tomorrow night. For now, I want to quickly check that I can view a simple static html page on my Apache web server……
Excellent, it worked. In the terminal I typed
sudo gedit /var/www/index.html
which opened the text editor. I copied the source code of the index page of my Tranquillizer website, saved, then pointed my browser at http://localhost/ and the page is there, in all its glory. Just to be sure (I am like that) I created a page called page.htm and then pointed my browser to http://localhost/page.htm and guess what? It worked. One question I have (which you are free to answer, as I am going to bed now, and will probably forget to look it up) is why when pointing the browser to an non-existent page, the message shown is:
Not Found
The requested URL /page2 was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.3 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.1 Server at localhost Port 80
With no mention of 404. What is 404? When does it get shown?
I guess that the next steps in my wen hosting and Linux server administration journey would be to “open up” port 80, and somehow point a website to it. Need to sort out DNS, name servers, IP addresses etc. Do I have a static IP address? What else do I need? More to come…. more questions, and hopefully soon more answers.
Keep reading, and soon you too will know exactly how to host your own websites. Well, that assumes that I manage to do so without too many problems!
Ah, just spotted that 404 is there, in the page title, but not shown on screen in the H1 element. Another question answered. You will have to be faster next time readers!