Apache HTTPD – Getting Started
Requesting a Site
Please see the Shared Apache HTTPD Service page for information about how to request a Shared Apache HTTPD site.
Accessing the Service
SSH/SFTP Access to Development
All developers require an account on the development system. Accounts can be requested by filling out an account request form. Developers can access the development server using any standard SSH/SFTP client they choose. However, they must be connected to the Purdue University network either directly or via VPN services. Connections should be made to ldvwebapa02.www.purdue.edu on port 22 (the standard for SSH/SFTP) using the developer’s Career Account credentials. Once connected, the developer will be in their home directory on the server.
You will find your site’s directory at /var/www/html/root/{production-host-name}/{site-path}/. As a convenience, ~/HTML/{production-host-name}/{site-path} can be used instead as a shortcut. Your site’s private data is stored in /var/www/data/root/{production-host-name}/{site-path} (or ~/DATA/{production-host-name}/{site-path}). The results of your edits can be seen immediately at your site’s Development URL.
When you see {production-host-name}, this is the host name part of your Production site URL. For example, if your Production site URL is “www.purdue.edu/example/site”, then {production-host-name} is “www.purdue.edu”. Similarly, when you see {site-path}, this is the directory path to your site. In this example, that would be “/example/site”. In cases where your site is at the top level, like example-site.org, then {production-host-name} is “example-site.org” and {site-path} is just a “/” (forward slash).
Web Access
Web browsers access the systems using the standard HTTPS protocol. The site can be accessed by:
- https://development-URL
- https://qa-URL
- https://production-URL
In most cases, the development URL will be the same as the production URL with “dev.” added to the front, and the qa URL will be the same as the production URL with “qa.” added to the front.
Note that development and qa are restricted to the Purdue network IP addresses to prevent the exposure of security issues that might exist in sites being developed and to prevent search engines from crawling these non-production servers.
Directory Security
Various security levels are available to control who has access to your web site (or parts of it) and where they come from. Please review our Security Levels matrix for Apache HTTPD sites and contact Web Services to request your choice. Note that this is not CAS (Central Authentication Services) as that is implemented entirely within your web site/application.
Deploying Files
Web Services tries to reserve the word “deploy” for the function of our Deploy Tool. This is not some elitist idea, but more to help communicate the stages of the process. Tools like Cascade use the term “publish”, but we recognize that other tools may use “deploy”. Despite this, we will always use “publish” when referring to putting the site contents on the development server and “deploy” when referring to the Deploy Tool’s copying of files to qa and production.
There are as many ways to publish your site contents to the development server as there are tools to do the job. However, they all use the same ssh/SFTP mechanisms mentioned above. We have example configurations for some common tools.
You then use the Web Services Deploy Tool to deploy the files to qa (where they become available at your qa URL) and, after testing, use the Web Services Deploy Tool to deploy the files to production (where they become available at your production URL).
Accessing Logs
The logs for the development Apache HTTPD sites should be directly available on the servers in the directory /var/log/httpd/vhosts/production-host-name/. This can be useful when troubleshooting a new application in development as the normal Linux tools (less, grep, etc.) are available. For qa and production (and for development), you can use the Unified Log Viewer application. The Log Viewer first breaks all Web Services systems out into Dev, QA, and Prod tiers, and then by a friendly system name within each tier. For the Shared Apache HTTPD service, the service is “Shared Apache – PPWC 2017”. From there, you select the host and then the log you wish to review. The Log Viewer understands gzip compressed log files, has pagination, download, and some search capabilities.