PHP

How to install and configure Apache2 on WSL2?

I hope you already have WSL2 installed and enabled. So, setting up Apache2 on WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2) involves a few steps. Below are the detailed instructions to install and configure Apache2 on WSL2:

Open your Linux distribution from the Start menu or you can use Terminal for this.
Update the package listing, run following command.
- sudo apt update
Run following command, to install Apache2
- sudo apt install apache2
Now after installing apache2, configure it. Run following command to start it’s service.
- sudo service apache2 start
To check status, use the following command.
- sudo service apache2
- You should see a status message indicating that Apache2 is active and running.
Enable Apache2 to start on boot, use following command.
- sudo systemctl enable apache2
By default, WSL2 does not have a firewall enabled, but if you have a firewall setup, you need to allow traffic on port 80 and 443 (HTTP and HTTPS respectively).
- sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
- sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
Now you can access Apache2 web server from browser. Open browser on your Windows machine and go to http://localhost or http://<WSL2_IP_ADDRESS>, you can get WSL2 IP address by following command.
- hostname -I

Optional Configurations:

If you want to make any change in configuration file like change port or projects directory, then you can find it on following path.

/etc/apache2/apace2.conf
Make necessary changes and save the file, you will need to open the file with sudo command as follows.
- sudo nano /et c/apache2/apache2.conf
Restart the Apache2 service.
- sudo service apache2 restart

After restarting the service you can check web server in Windows browser as mentioned in above steps. You should see webserver page if there isn’t any error. To check error logs run following command.