Apache how-to for cygwin

[Jay Abel]

> On 14 January 2007 21:30, Jay Abel wrote:
>
>> I must have googled the wrong terms,
>
>  Going to google in the first place was wrong.  Cygwin comes with
> documentation, you only had to look as far as your own hard drive!
>
> /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/apache-1.3.33.README

Got it thanks.  I first looked in /usr/share/doc/apache-1.3.33.README 
and didn't notice the above until later.  Notwithstanding, I couldn't 
get the service to start as advertised, even after changing the user 
name in httpd.conf.

I did get the service to start as a regular user, and XP just prompted 
to ask me if I wanted to allow it to listen on port 80, so I said yes, 
and problem solved.  Now the service just runs as `apache' from the 
start.

I'll try to get it running as system again tomorrow when I'm fresh, now 
that I know how it's supposed to work.  I'll be sure to delete any old 
logs / pid files before I try again.

>
>  You don't actually say what you did in your experiments to get it 
> running,
> but you've probably mangled the perms on important files in the 
> process.  (If
> a file doesn't exist when you run apache for the first time, it 
> creates that
> file.  If it's running as an unexpected user, it may end up creating 
> that file
> with perms that prevent it from re-accessing the file when you later 
> try
> running apache as a different user).  Pid and log files are 
> particularly
> vulnerable to this problem, so be aware you may need to delete or 
> chown some
> of them to get it up and running when you follow the README 
> instructions.

I didn't have to do much once I figured out what was wrong, I just had 
to ensure that the server ran as a regular user, and that the user 
(`apache' in this case) had appropriate access to /var/www/, /var/run/, 
/var/log/apache/, and I moved the default log location in the config 
file to /var/log/apache/.  Then it worked.  But it didn't like running 
as system, or perhaps, windows didn't like it running as system, and/or 
wouldn't let it switch to a limited user, in this case `apache'.  I 
assume the default procedure has worked for at least one other person, 
so I suppose it's just something weird with my machine.

>
>  BTW, a process needs to run as a user.  Trying to run it as a group
> ("Administrators, Users, or None") doesn't make sense.  I don't know 
> if giving
> write access to /var/run for users is a good thing either, but it's 
> the way my
> installation runs:  /var/run has rwx for user and group, the user is 
> my
> username and the group is 'Users'.

Of course.  The process runs as a user but the user's group membership 
can also determine what directories the process may access.  It 
obviously wouldn't have made sense to chown /var/run/ to the user 
`apache', so the only other possibility was to be sure the group access 
to /var/run/ was a group to which `apache' belongs; /var/run/ used to 
have the group `Administrators' so apache couldn't write its pid file. 
I thought that I might be able to create a group to allow access to 
/var/run/ without granting that right to all users -- I just left a step 
out in my explanation.

As you suggest, ensuring that /var/run/ is rwx by group, and chowning it 
to <someone>:Users, and ensuring that apache is a member of Users, that 
got things working.  The reason it took so long for me to figure that 
out (besides my obvious lack of skill) is because (I suppose) it tried 
to write its pid file before it had opened the log file and failed 
before it could say what was wrong (or wrote it somewhere else and I 
just missed it). 


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