Hello,
Hi,
While waiting for someone else to give an answer about splitting the apache package like other distros do, I'd like to point out that the above statement is false.
I would like to make a suggestion for the apache package, I was not too sure which mailing list to put this in, so I picked the general mailing list for the avoidance of doubt :P
So the apache package:
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/apache/
Currently contains tools which are used by nginx users, and the issue is that is that you can only run one webserver as once, they both are going to try to bind to port 80 and 443 so you got to choose.
There's no issue having two (or more) webservers installed at once, and no issues having two (or more) of them running at the same time either, as long as they don't run on the same port. While, apache and nginx will indeed both use the 80 or 443 port by default, this is something you can change in the configuration file.
So for people that face the situation described in this mail: You
can install the apache package alongside nginx (in order to use
`htpasswd`) without issue. If you decide to have them both running
at the same time, just make sure to bind the `listen`
parameter in the default apache and nginx configurations files to
a different port for each of them.
htpaswd utility is used by nginx users too, and the issue is they have to install the entire apache web server in order to be able to use the single utility.
I suggest splitting the package into apache-utils and apache, or, if the maintainer(s) are willing to maintain it, split the utilities into their own separate pacakge and use apache-utils as a group of all the subpackages (htpasswd, htdigest etc).
I feel this would be a good change so that nginx users do not need to install the entire apache web server just to use the apache utilities which nginx suggests to use within their documentation (see https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-controls/configuring-http-basic-authentication/)
As you can see in the guide, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS and Oracle Linux already have seen this issue within their own repositories and split the packages up, why can't arch linux?
As I said earlier, I'll let other people react to this, but I'll still try to give some thoughts/answers:
As far as I know, not splitting package too much is
actually a choice. Indeed, Arch purposely avoid having too many
split packages (hence the lack of `lib` or `utils` packages in
Arch compare to Debian for instance) to keep things as simple as
possible, according to the Arch philosophy.
On a side note, from a purely technical stand point, there isn't a
huge difference between installing the apache package and not
starting the httpd web-server daemon on Arch and install
`apache2-utils` on Debian?
I mean, sure the latter only provides utilities and not the
web-server itself while the first one provides both, but nothing
obligates you to actually start and use the web-server, so I don't
see why installing the `apache` package on Arch would be more
conflicting regarding nginx than installing the `apache2-utils`
package on Debian for people that wants to use `htpasswd`.
Thanks for reading this suggestion,
-- Regards, Robin Candau
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