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Running standalone

If the Web server is started when the system is booted the server command line generally has to be put into one of the system's startup files. The names and structure of these files vary considerably from system to system. You may need to refer to your own system documentation to determine the precise details. On UNIX systems the start-up files are referred to as rc files; local additions to standard UNIX services are usually started from a file named /etc/rc.local, /etc/rc.2/S90local or something very similar, and this is where the command line to start the Web server should go.

The precise server command line depends on the server in use, but will usually specify the location of a configuration file and possibly the port number to use. More details can be found in Section . As an example, the CERN server may be started by including the following command lines in the relevant system start-up file:

  # Start CERN Web server
  if [ -x /usr/local/etc/httpd ]; then
    echo "Starting WWW server"
    /usr/local/etc/httpd -p 80 -r /usr/local/etc/httpd.conf &
  fi

The command to start the server is often included in a conditional statement which checks that the server program exists, as shown above.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.