If you're going to run two Apache servers, you'll need two complete (and different) sets of configuration, log, and other files. In this scenario we'll use a dedicated root directory for each server, which is a personal choice. You can choose to have both servers living under the same root, but this may cause problems since it requires a slightly more complicated configuration. This decision would allow you to share some directories, such as include (which contains Apache headers), but this can become a problem later, if you decide to upgrade one server but not the other. You will have to solve the problem then, so why not avoid it in the first place?

First let's prepare the sources. We will assume that all the sources go into the /home/stas/src directory. Since you will probably want to tune each copy of Apache separately, it is better to use two separate copies of the Apache source for this configuration. For example, you might want only the httpd_docs server to be built with the mod_rewrite module.

Having two independent source trees will prove helpful unless you use dynamically shared objects (covered later in this chapter).

Make two subdirectories:

panic% mkdir /home/stas/src/httpd_docs
panic% mkdir /home/stas/src/httpd_perl

Next, put the Apache source into the /home/stas/src/httpd_docs directory (replace 1.3.x with the version of Apache that you have downloaded):

panic% cd /home/stas/src/httpd_docs
panic% tar xvzf ~/src/apache_1.3.x.tar.gz

Now prepare the httpd_perl server sources:

panic% cd /home/stas/src/httpd_perl
panic% tar xvzf ~/src/apache_1.3.x.tar.gz
panic% tar xvzf ~/src/modperl-1.xx.tar.gz

panic% ls -l
drwxr-xr-x  8 stas  stas 2048 Apr 29 17:38 apache_1.3.x/
drwxr-xr-x  8 stas  stas 2048 Apr 29 17:38 modperl-1.xx/

We are going to use a default Apache directory layout and place each server directory under its dedicated directory. The two directories are:

/home/httpd/httpd_perl/
/home/httpd/httpd_docs/

We are using the user httpd, belonging to the group httpd, for the web server. If you don't have this user and group created yet, add them and make sure you have the correct permissions to be able to work in the /home/httpd directory.