HomeApache Page 6 - Building Apache the Way You Want It
Building Apache from Source As an RPM (Apache 2) - Apache
Have you ever wanted to customize Apache? This article will help you get started on building a customized version of Apache to suit your own needs. It is taken from chapter three of the book Pro Apache third edition, written by Peter Wainwright (Apress, 2004; ISBN: 1590593006).
Recent releases of the Apache 2 source distribution contain an RPM .spec file that you can use to build Apache as an installable RPM. The httpd.spec file contains all the details needed to build a default Apache installation and can be used without even unpacking the source archive with this:
$ rpm -tb httpd-2.0.47.tar.gz
This tells the RPM tool to look inside a .tar file for the .spec file (-t) and to build only binary RPMs (-b). Configuration and building of Apache takes place automatically and should result in four RPM files being generated in /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i386 (this path may vary according to Linux distribution and processor architecture):
For the build to be successful, you’ll need to have several other packages installed first, notably perl and findutils, but the build prerequisites also include pkgconfig, expat-devel, db3-devel, and openldap-devel. To get SSL support, you also need openssl-devel. Each of the -devel packages in turn needs its parent package, and these in turn may have other dependencies.
This is, however, misleading: It’s possible you might need all of these packages, but you can also build an RPM package that doesn’t. You can—and should—edit the httpd.spec file to eliminate dependencies you don’t require. For example, openldap is needed only if you want mod_ldap, and mod_auth_ldap.pkgconfig is needed only on some Linux distributions. Likewise, db3 is needed only if you want mod_auth_dbm to be able to handle Berkeley DB format databases. Similarly, expat-devel is needed only if you want Apache to build with an existing Expat XML parser installation; otherwise, it’ll happily build using the cut-down version that’s included in the Apache source.
These dependences exist because the build instructions in httpd.spec include the modules that require them, but you can remove unnecessary packages from the BuildReq: line so long as you also remove the dependant modules. At the same time, if you want to ensure that the optional httpd-ssl package is built (in other words, make it mandatory), you add openssl-devel:
Within the httpd.spec file is a configure command, which is most easily locatable by searching for a --prefix command line argument. You can customize this using all the criteria and strategies I’ve already discussed for a stand-alone configure command, with the advantage of creating an installable package as the end product. You should remove any part of the command you don’t need—particularly modules that you don’t need but also directory locations. You should also add a layout to provide the basic structure of the installed server. You can even merge the SSL package into the main server, if you want to eliminate it as a separately installable component.
Because you want to edit the .spec file, it’s easiest to extract it singly from the archive and then build it using the -b option to RPM. This requires that the original archive file is present where rpm looks for it, in the SOURCES subdirectory of the RPM system:
If all goes well, this should generate Apache RPMs built according to your precise specifications, including whichever modules and features you want included. You can store the httpd.spec file somewhere safe and reuse it any time to regenerate your Apache setup. As new releases of Apache are made available, you can move your changes into the new httpd.spec (assuming it has changed) with a minimum of fuss and build those according to the same criteria as before.
