Rather than having simple static pages like our hello world page, we can display text stored in a database. This allows us to have a page that dynamically updates, depending on the data we have stored.
We are going to use a lightweight relational database management system called SQLite to demonstrate how our web server can display content stored in a database. We will use SQLite version 3 for this project.
SQLite version 3 can be installed via the following command:
sudo apt-get install sqlite3
Once installed, you can create a new database by simply specifying a file name after the call to the SQLite shell program:
sqlite3 webserverdb.db
With SQLite 3, every database is simply a file on the system, so go ahead and run the preceding command. This will now drop you into the SQLite shell. From here, we can use SQL to create a database and populate it with dummy data.
Let's quickly look at some SQL features in order to aid us.