Just as with Perl modules, if you don't have the permissions required to install Apache into the system area, you have to install them locally under your home directory. It's almost the same as a plain installation, but you have to run the server listening to a port number greater than 1024 (only root processes can listen to lower-numbered ports).

Another important issue you have to resolve is how to add startup and shutdown scripts to the directories used by the rest of the system services. Without root access, you won't be able to do this yourself; you'll have to ask your system administrator to assist you.

To install Apache locally, all you have to do is to tell ./configure in the Apache source directory what target directories to use. If you are following the convention that we use, which makes your home directory look like the / (base) directory, the invocation parameters will be:

panic% ./configure --prefix=/home/stas

Apache will use the prefix for the rest of its target directories, instead of the default /usr/local/apache. If you want to see what they are, add the —show-layout option before you proceed:

panic% ./configure --prefix=/home/stas --show-layout

You might want to put all the Apache files under /home/stas/apache, following Apache's convention:

panic% ./configure --prefix=/home/stas/apache

If you want to modify some or all of the names of the automatically created directories, use the —sbindir, —sysconfdir, and —logfiledir options:

panic% ./configure --prefix=/home/stas/apache \
    --sbindir=/home/stas/apache/sbin          \
    --sysconfdir=/home/stas/apache/conf       \
    --logfiledir=/home/stas/apache/logs

Refer to the output of ./configure —help for all available options.

Also remember that you can start the script only under a user and group to which you belong, so you must set the User and Group directives in httpd.conf to appropriate values.

Furthermore, as we said before, the Port directive in httpd.conf must be adjusted to use an unused port above 1024, such as 8080. This means that when users need to access the locally installed server, their URLs need to specify the port number (e.g., http://www.example.com:8080/). Otherwise, browsers will access the server running on port 80, which isn't the one you installed locally.