When we are ready to test the changes made, we can perform a pre-flight check with the following command:

# apachectl configtest

You may receive an error message reporting that the hostname could not be resolved. This is a warning and is okay for the moment. The warning is shown in the following screenshot:

The Syntax Ok message at the end is what we want to see; with this, we know that we can restart the web server. Issuing a reload command to the service will force a graceful restart; wait for the active connections to complete before the restart is initiated:

$ sudo systemctl reload httpd

The effect of the change is limited because we have allowed the local network access and the localhost. Removing the indexes option has no effect while the index.html page is present. If we remove the index.html page, we will receive access forbidden messages because the system will not generate the page. This is important to set because it removes the ability of hackers...