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Web Servers - Introduction

Module by: Pat Shuff

Summary: Web servers are good for publishing and communicating ideas. In this section we will introduce a web server and why you would want to configure and install one

Web servers are used for a variety of reasons. Mainly, they are used to deliver information and data from a server to a web browser. At most universities the faculty, staff, and students are provided a web server through central information technology or their department. Typically, if a user creates a directory called public_html and creates a hypertext markup language (html) files in this directory and subdirectories, they can share data to other people by sharing the universal resource locator (url). If their department or central computing does not provide links to the users home directories, they might want to install and configure their own web server.

Web pages can be deployed with various levels of complexity. The simplest way to share text from a web server is to create a text file text.txt, for example, in a directory that a web server is configured to share with other computers. We can put any text in the text.txt file and a web browser can read this file by going to the web server and requesting the file from one of its directories. The contents of this page will be displayed in the web browser.

The next level of complexity is to publish the text information framed by a markup language so that it can be formatted and enriched. If we save the text in a file called text.html in a directory that a web server is configured to share with other computers, the user will see the text just as was seen in the text.txt file. We can enrich our text by adding things like headers, titles, font changes, and links to other web pages.

It is important to note that we did not do anything special to the web server to share these files other than configure it to share the directory and all of its contents to a web browser that requests the files.

The important point to take away from this section is that a web server is a mechanism to share files to a web browser. If a user puts a file in the directory that the web server is configured to share, the file can be read from a web browser. It is important to note that the web server allows browsers to read files but are typically not configured to allow browsers to write files.

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