The simplest task that an Apache server can perform is to serve a static website. When a browser sends an HTTP request to such a site, Apache processes the incoming URL, maps its path to a file on disk, and returns the contents of that file to the browser. If the file contains HTML code, a web page is rendered in the browser.

A single Apache instance can serve multiple websites, but for this recipe, we will configure only a single website as Apache's default site. If this is your only configuration, it will be used regardless of what IP address or domain name is associated with the incoming request.

In this recipe, we will configure Apache as a single-site server. It will respond to incoming requests with static files from the directory /var/www/default.

If you want to serve different websites under different domain names, you will have to create virtual host configurations for each domain. This topic is covered in the recipe Creating a virtual host.