Welcome to Instant Debian – Build a Web Server.

With the advent of social computing and the explosion of data and API-based economies, web applications are taken to a whole new level. They are not the vehicle but the center of gravity of a big part of the IT industry, including the enterprise customers.

No longer do companies choose a technology stack just because of features but because of reduced time to market, which enables them to grow faster and accommodate demand while keeping a sane bottom line.

Debian has a long-standing tradition as a very flexible GNU/Linux-based distribution, in part because of its packaging system and also because it has been made possible by a dynamic community of developers and maintainers.

Even though it is a proven platform for web applications, most web developers face steep learning curves. Maybe this happens because they are not familiar with GNU/Linux, they have an enterprise experience with other packaging systems such as RPM, or because they traditionally didn't manage aspects such as performance or security.

Although it's meant to be just a starting point in your Debian journey, the standardized instructions in this book, such as using sudo or apt-get, can be replicated across most administrative and development scenarios you will encounter in the future.

The book also outlines an effective approach to performance and scaling by presenting different architectures that can help accommodate growth, including cloud computing, where Debian can run as a workload to increase your efficiencies.

This micro book covers the decision-making process, installation, and configuration of a solid foundation on which you can deploy web-based applications on Debian—whether they are written on PHP, Perl, Python, or Ruby.

Starting off by providing a little knowledge of Debian, this book will guide you to a properly configured system that tackles the most common pitfalls DevOps encounter, such as partitioning, filesystem permissions, or scaling, thereby providing a straightforward approach to Debian for web applications.

Without further ado, we can proceed to the first set of recipes.