In praise of Apache documentation
2nd March 2004
I spent much of today upgrading a distinctly hairy Apache 1.3 server to Apache 2.0 as part of a routine OS upgrade. It certainly wasn’t plain sailing—I still have a few crinkles to iron out—but that’s more down to the weirdness of the existing configuration than any problems with Apache 2.
Apache 2 is a beautifully designed piece of software. The documentation is superb—the migration guide proved invaluable but the real gem was the directive quick reference. Armed with the quick reference and Firefox’s Type Ahead Find the previously inpenetrable httpd.conf file becomes a living tutorial on the wild and wonderful ways of Apache configuration. A wise old sysadmin once told me that the best way of learning Linux is to ls /bin and run man <command> for every command in there—then do the same thing for /sbin, then /usr/bin and so on until you run out of things to read. The same appears to be true of Apache configuration directives.
More recent articles
- Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content - 8th May 2024
- Weeknotes: more datasette-secrets, plus a mystery video project - 7th May 2024
- Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets - 23rd April 2024
- Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM - 22nd April 2024
- AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now - 17th April 2024
- Three major LLM releases in 24 hours (plus weeknotes) - 10th April 2024
- Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus - 8th April 2024
- Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser - 30th March 2024
- llm cmd undo last git commit - a new plugin for LLM - 26th March 2024
- Building and testing C extensions for SQLite with ChatGPT Code Interpreter - 23rd March 2024