Apache is the most popular web server to date and is an excellent solution for our goal of using only free software. The installation is also extremely easy.
Install apache2
ben@pyro-dev:~$ sudo apt-get install apache2
Well that was easy. Now we need to configure a few things. A lot of web application frameworks make use of an Apache module called mod_rewrite. You can learn exactly what it does by visiting http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html.
Install mod_rewrite module and restart to enableben@pyro-dev:~$ sudo a2enmod rewrite ben@pyro-dev:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Believe it or not, that is all we need to do with Apache. There are endless other configurations and tweaks that can be done (and they are well documented on Apache's site) but we won't be needing anything more for our simple web server. Let's move on to MySQL!