This guide will help you modify, compile and install a custom HTTPD server!

To download the HTTPD Source code, you can go to the Apache Site. Or you could just directly download the file into your downloads folder like so

(On the day of creating this guide, the latest version is 2.4.41)

wget https://www-us.apache.org/dist//httpd/httpd-2.4.41.tar.gz

Extract the gzip like so

gzip -d httpd-2.4.41.tar.gz
tar xvf httpd-2.4.41.tar

Now, you should see a directory containing all the files required to build httpd

To add a custom version name, you can navigate to include/ap_release.h where it contains the httpd versioning parameters and modify the AP_SERVER_ADD_STRING.

#if !AP_SERVER_DEVBUILD_BOOLEAN
#define AP_SERVER_ADD_STRING "-gci"
#else
#ifndef AP_SERVER_ADD_STRING
#define AP_SERVER_ADD_STRING "-gci-dev"
#endif
#endif

To configure the build, you can easily run the provided configure file

./configure

This will automatically configure to install to /usr/local/apache2. If you wanted to install this somewhere else you can define the prefix parameter and the path where you want it to be installed.

./configure --prefix=/path/to/installation

To compile and install the custom Apache HTTPD server, run

make

and then

sudo make install

This will compile and install automatically to /usr/local/apache2.

To start the server, you can run

sudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -k start

or

sudo /path/to/installation/bin/apachectl -k start

After starting the server, you can test it by going to localhost and it should return you the index.html

The logs will also include your custom name, to check it you can go to logs/error_log in your installation.

[Fri Jan 10 20:17:50.912250 2020] [mpm_event:notice] [pid 16855:tid 140452566600640] AH00489: Apache/2.4.$
[Fri Jan 10 20:17:50.912731 2020] [core:notice] [pid 16855:tid 140452566600640] AH00094: Command line: '/$

You can replace the index.html that is located in the htdocs of your installation to see if it works!

Congratulations! You've build your own custom apache server!