The following comands have been tested on Debian Linux Jessie (current stable). Commands preceded with the # prompt must be run as root. Commands preceded with the $ prompt must be run as user. To switch to root user, use one of the following commands - depending on your setup:

$ sudo su -

or

$ su -

If you have already setup Apache, it may be a good idea to make a fresh installation so that the following steps apply directly on your setup. This is up to you to decide. The following commands will remove Apache and its related packages along with their configuration:

# apt-get remove --purge apache2 libapache2-mod-php5
# apt-get autoremove --purge

Then reinstall Apache with PHP support:

# apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5

You probably want to use libccgi for implementing your CGI programs in C. This is a good time to install the library's dependencies.

apt-get install libssl-dev

In oreder to work from your user directory, you need to enable the userdir Apache module. You also need to enable the cgi module. Use the following commands:

# a2enmod userdir
# a2enmod cgi

PHP is by default disabled for users. You need to edit /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf in order to enable it. Use a text editor to open the file and comment-out the <IfModule mod_userdir.c>...</IfModule> block at the bottom of the file.

CGI also has to be enabled for users. Edit file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/userdir.conf and add the following configuration block below the existing <Directory>...</Directory> block:

<Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin>
 	Options ExecCGI
	SetHandler cgi-script
</Directory>

Use the following command to restart your Apache server and apply the changes we made above.

# service apache2 restart

When things don't work ass expected, you may get useful information from the Apache log files.

Error log:

# tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log

Access log:

# tail -f  /var/log/apache2/access.log

User web directories are served from ~/public_html and served e.g. from http://127.0.0.1/~user, if your username is user. To test that everything working, use the following commands and visit your user page. It should read Hello world!.

$ [ -d ~/public_html ] && mv -f ~/public_html ~/public_html.old
$ mkdir ~/public_html
$ echo '<?php echo("Hello world!"); ?>' > ~/public_html/index.php

If you see the message, you can remove the test public_html.

$ rm -rf ~/public_html

If the message isn't displayed, check your Apache error logs for hints on what went wrong.

To setup your user working environment, you first need to clone the intprog-samples repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/m000/intprog-samples

Then link the web directory to your public_html.

$ ln -s intprog-samples/assignment4/web ~/public_html

Finally, run make from the assignment directory to generate configuration and setup Smarty template engine.

$ cd intprog-samples/assignment4
$ make

You are all set!

For your convenience, a Makefile rule has been added to create the zip file you should submit for this assignment. Just run the following command to have a zip file created for you.

make zip

The archive will exclude many unwanted files, such as object files, compiled classes, the smarty directory etc. If you want to have additional unwanted files excluded, just edit the mkexcludes.sh script accordingly.