>Web Server setup on Mac OS X computers

By Jerry Winegarden, Duke University and RTPnet.org
Last revised 03/28/03

There are three steps that you must take to get a web server running with your web pages on a Mac OS X machine:

  1. Create and Configure the service
  2. Locate your web pages in the correct directory (folder)
  3. Start the service running

Create and Configure Web Service

==>Server Configuration ==>WebServer ==>Sites
You will create a web "site", by adding a site for your machine's IP number (e.g. 10.47.0.11) from this configuration page.

Log in as admin (or your name if you are an "administrator" = "root user") and click on the Server Configuration tool icon on the bottom. From there, go to the Webserver configuration, and then click on the "Sites" tab.

You will need to know the IP number of your web server (e.g. 10.47.0.11) and the "DNS" name (if any) that it is registered for it.

In addition, the web service for "localhost" with IP number 127.0.0.1 should be enabled (it should already be created). It is enabled if there is a check in the box ahead of its entry in the web services list.

Locate our web pages in the correct directory (folder)

By default, web pages should be located in /Library/WebServer/Documents
That is, looking in the Documents subfolder of the WebServer subfolder of the Library folder. Note: this is the default location "out of the box". If you have your web pages located in some other folder, then the configuration can be changed to point to where they are.
This location is called the "Document Root", meaning, where the web server should START looking for web pages. Thus, to access the home page, you would type:
http://your.web.server.name_or_ip_number

but to edit these files, you would go to the "/var/httpd/Documents" folder.

If you use ftp (or appleshare) to copy your files over from another machine, then place them here. Create any subdirectories (subfolders) as needed.

By default, web server looks for a "home page" called: "index.html"

If it can't find index.html, then it looks for a home page called: "index.php"

The name of the default home page is settable in the web server configuration (see above). Thus, you could have a home page called: "default.html" (earlier apple macintosh web servers used this as a home page name) or "index.htm" (If the file is created and/or edited on a Microsoft Windows computer, they can't handle files named .html, but only .htm)

Also, the Document Root location is settable. If you want to place your web files somewhere besides /var/httpd/Documents, then you can make the apache httpd web server configuration change.

Start the web service

This is done using the same configuration tool. There is a check box.

==>System Preferences ==>Sharing ==>Start

(Note: since this is a Unix system with nice Macintosh GUI interfaces, you can also do some of the configuration and start/stop/restart of services such as the web server "by hand" through a ""terminal" (command or shell) window. More on how to do this will be added later.)