Re: Re: make apache 2.4.17 portable under ubuntu (Apache Users)

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 5:23 PM, Good Guy <xfsgpr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 16/10/15 22:11, Raf Roger wrote:

I used during several years a portable version of my webserver under windows 7/8 to shift from laptop to desktop computer and without duplicating webserver from one computer to another.

i'm trying to do the same under ubuntu 15.04 however it seems that only few people did it.
1. why people under linux do not use portable webserver (e.g. on USB drive) ?
2. how can i make apache 2.4.x portable, so to have all needed files (apache, php, openssl, etc) on a USB drive and make it work as standard web server?
so in fact how to make apache looks after its configuration files and librairies under its own directory where it will be stored ?

I suspect this may not be possible in a Linux environment because Linux doesn't use binaries.

In Windows, it is pretty easy to create executable binaries and put them on flash drive with all the necessary configuration files and voilà it is done. I have used in Windows by downloading the Apache binaries from http://apachelounge.com and php binaries from http://windows.php.netand mysql binaries from mysql.com and you are done. With Linux, this can't be done as far as I can see because of the way how linux (ubuntu, Mint etc etc) works. My experience of Linux is limited so I too would like to know if it is possible to launch an Apache server from usb drive.

That is not correct, Good Guy. Linux, and pretty much any operating system, uses binary programs. Which means programs that consist of machine executable op codes. And Apache HTTP server on Linux is no different: it is a binary program. I would love to know where you got the idea that Linux does not use binaries.

It's trivial to create a Apache HTTP server that can be run from a USB stick if all of the systems have compatible architectures (e.g., x86, x86_64, or ppc) and support libraries (e.g., the libc library). It's more difficult but still possible to create a portable server even if those assumptions are not true. You simply need to build everything from source and specify an installation root directory that will be valid for all the systems on which you want to run the server (i.e., a directory where you can mount the USB filesystem or symlink to it). You can't simply copy the httpd binary and related files that are created for a given distribution because the various parts are spread all over (e.g., /usr/bin and /usr/lib). Which is to say the only common directory for all the files you need is root ("/").

P.S., There are very fringe, unusual, computers that directly execute byte code for languages like Forth and Java rather than machine language as typically understood by most CPUs. But even those systems are effectively executing binaries.

Kurtis Rader

Caretaker of the exceptional canines Junior and Hank