Applying Apache patches in CentOS

Question

I am facing some problems regarding Apache patches. Can someone enlighten me by pinpointing some step-by-step directions for applying patches to an Apache server in a production environment?

Answer 1

You can use yum to do this

sudo yum upgrade httpd

Will upgrade your Apache installation and it's dependencies to the latest available for your CentOS.

Answer 2

There are many different methodologies for deploying patches. As mentioned above installing httpd / php / perl / mysql via yum is one way then you can simply use yum to manage your updates. Another way is you could compile from source. This allows you a great deal more control over your update/upgrade paths and you are not reliant on someone to create a package for a zero day exploits or patches that have not been released to yum.

For our core services we typically compile from source to assure they are configured the exact way we want and we can be judicious for each update. Not to mention there is less opportunity to update/upgrade versions of by typing: # yum -y update *

Which has happened before. If you are wanting to update Apache via source it's pretty simple. Typically what we do is keep a repository of installed packages and sources in /usr/local/src/

If you still have the original source install directory you can download the version you want to upgrade to, extract it to it's own directory. Copy the config.nice over to the new install and run the config.nice and it will install/keep all the old setting. Then you just backup the src directory along with your web directory and you can redeploy or add servers pretty fast.

Here is a sample of the steps I suggested.

# cd /usr/local/src/Apache-$version
# cp ../Apache-$old-version/config.nice .
#./config.nice
# make; make install
# /etc/init.d/httpd restart

You need to decide on what version and install parameters you want to run. Make the initial install and then you have a path moving forward using the steps above. Best of luck!