For those of us who are not Apache experts but are aching to run our own Webservers, relief is finally at hand! Or at least, it appears to be under development. At long last there is a graphical front end for configuring and administering Apache — the Comanche project. Comanche is primarily written in Tcl, and makes heavy use of XML. It is extensible, and according to the documentation can accept plugins written in a variety of different languages. The project is being sponsored by Covalent Technologies and is distributed under the Apache license.
Comanche was born out of a desire to find a shortcut for configuring Apache. Unfortunately, unless you already know a decent amount about Apache, setting up Comanche is almost as intimidating as setting up Apache was before.
Comanche’s installation process is a bit complicated for newbies, requiring the user to set and configure various PATH names and such. If these are not set correctly, Comanche will not recognize your httpd server. To make matters worse, Comanche doesn’t have any option to undo the configuration once you’ve entered it. The only way we could figure how to do this was to delete and re-install Comanche. Not the most convenient way to go about things, to say the least.
Our configuration problems continued beyond that point — on our next attempt, we managed to lock Comanche up during the configuration. However, the third time seemed to be the charm, and Comanche finally came up ready…
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