Introduction to installing web apps.

Web applications are a boon to the computing environment. Traditionally you would load computer software applications locally on every system.  Even with automated software deployment systems, can still be support intensive. With web applications you can load applications just  once on a server and let all users access the applications as they need them via a web browser. You also only have to update only one system as improvements to software become available. This can be a tremendous savings in support time devoted to software deployment. Examples of web applications that can be used for small business can be found at: http://www.instructables.com/id/Uses-for-your-own-private-cloud/.

Where do you get such software? You can develop web applications yourself (and or even use open source code from existing sites where permitted i.e. no copyright or patent encumbered code), purchase web applications, and downland then install free (aka open source applications). Sourceforge.net is a good source for applications. Be careful as some applications that say they are open source are really not open source. You have to read the fine print.

Note: This instructable requires some knowledge of the linux command line, basic html, a Lamp (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) based web server and administrative rights to the server via sudo.

Try this instructable also: http://www.instructables.com/id/Linux-screen-play/
After doing this instructable, you might also like: http://www.instructables.com/id/Statusnet-the-Twitter-clone-setup/ and or http://www.instructables.com/id/eyeOS/

Step 1: The root.

For a web server to display content, there must be web pages ( files with data and or instructions) that the web server can use for the web server to display.  Index.html (or index.htm) is the usual file name for the default file a web server will look for when displaying web pages.  Usually but not always the index.html will go into what is called the web root. This is where the web server expects files to be when serving out files. Of course this directory can be changed. On a lamp server, the web root or base web directory is /var/www. You do not have to do it but, we like to use the index.html file in the web root (/var/www/index.html) as a sort of menu or card catalog of what is on the server.