Practicalmadness

First off, let me briefly apologize to anyone who clicked through to this article expecting to see pictures of Indians Native Americans performing bizarre stunts such as swallowing goldfish, fighting the noble polar bear or drinking entire cans of Lysol and surviving to tell the tale while really, really high. On Lysol.

This article, rather, is about the Apache webserver, an open-source workhorse that powers many of the sites you enjoy on the intarwebs each and every day. Like that site with the adorable kittens with really poor grammar. Or more importantly, the BBC website. Or most importantly, this website.

Fellow nerds who, like your humble narrator, are engaged in the practice of developing websites for the continued awesomeness of these great internets of ours may find great value in the content to follow. This tutorial may be of particular interest to practitioners of something I shall refer to as “Rails development,” which (believe it or not!) has everything to do with websites and nothing to do with trains.

For you see, it has been my experience that while there have been several blog posts, articles, wiki pages, mailing list threads, mash notes and carrier pigeon-borne field manuals written on the topic of setting up a local webserver for the purposes of developing websites, there is currently no writing on the subject of how my local Apache environment is set up. And as I find my webserver setup to be elegant, useful and thoughtfully organized, I think it is well past time I get up on my high horse and tell you people how it’s done.

In short: if you are not a web developer you will want to get out while you still can. For serious nerdery follows after the jump.