3.3. Reloading the configuration

Apache needs to be told to re-read its configuration file before it will take account of changes, but it is not necessary to completely stop and restart our web server after each change. A rather faster mechanism is to cause it to reread its file to note changes. This can be done by using the reload option on the startup script.

# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
Reload httpd2 (graceful restart)                                   done

We are now running one web server supporting two web sites. However, if we request the index.html page from www.dept.cam.ac.uk then we get the source of the homepage and not the HTML rendering of it. We still have work to do.

Before we find out why, for completeness we should cover the assorted options that can be passed to the startup script beyond the start, restart and reload options we have met already.

Options to the startup script /etc/init.d/apache2

start

Starts the web server.

stop

Stops the web server.

restart

Stops and starts the web server.

try-restart

stop the web server and if this succeeds (i.e. if it was running before), start it again.

status

Indicates whether or not the web server is running.

full-server-status

Dump a full status screen; requires lynx or w3m

reload or graceful

Causes a running web server to reread its configuration file(s) and to reopen its log files.

help

Not much help!

configtest

Does not launch a web sever but forces it to parse the configuration file for syntactic validity.