Yrurtj

After building apache2 http server from source (2.4.23)
I don't have the a2dissite and a2ensite commands.

Configure was:

./configure --with-included-apr --prefix=/usr/local/apache2

When I run:

whereis apache2

I get:

apache2: /etc/apache2 /usr/local/apache2

But which apache2 shows nothing, maybe there needs to be some symlinking to /usr/bin? http://localhost is working fine.

Version info for source:

/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -v
Server version: Apache/2.4.23 (Unix)
Server built: Nov 1 2016 22:52:26

Linux version:

linux mint 17

3.13.0-37-generic #64-Ubuntu SMP Mon Sep 22 21:28:38 UTC 2014 x86_64 

I'm guessing you built from the source available from the Apache Software Foundation. The a2en... scripts (and the supporting configuration) are Debian-specific; you'll find the source code in the corresponding Debian repository.

Your best bet to build the httpd server from source and still be able to use a2ensite etc. is to use the Debian source package:

sudo apt-get install devscripts dpkg-dev build-essential

sudo apt-get build-dep apache2

dget http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/apache2/apache2_2.4.23-5.dsc

cd apache2-2.4.23

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

The first two commands install the packages necessary to build apache2; then dget downloads and extracts the source package, and dpkg-buildpackage builds it and produces a series of .deb packages you can install manually using dpkg as usual.

If the build-dep line doesn't work, the following is equivalent for apache2:

sudo apt-get install debhelper lsb-release libaprutil1-dev libapr1-dev libpcre3-dev zlib1g-dev libnghttp2-dev libssl-dev perl liblua5.2-dev libxml2-dev autotools-dev gawk dh-systemd

Don't symlink things to /usr/bin. That is an extremely bad idea and you should not do it.

Why? Because most of /usr, including /usr/bin, is reserved for the package manager. Anything that is not a package manager, including you, shouldn't be touching things in there.

/usr/local exists to provide a place to install locally-compiled software. Normally, you would provide /usr/local as a prefix, instead of /usr/local/apache2. (A prefix, by the way, is what's prefixed to the bin path, the library path, etc. So e.g. Apache's commandline tools would go in $PREFIX/bin, its libraries would go in $PREFIX/lib/apache2, etc.)

The solution to your problem is to add /usr/local/apache2/bin to the list of paths your shell uses to find binaries. This is usually referred to as $PATH or simply "your path", and can be changed with a command like:

export PATH="/usr/local/apache2/bin:$PATH"

You can put that in one of your shell's startup files to make it permanent.

That all being said, I suspect you still won't find a2ensite or a2dissite. If I recall correctly, both of these commands were added by Debian developers and then inherited from there by Mint. Therefore, they aren't included in upstream Apache source code. Stephen Kitt's excellent answer will tell you how to get these commands.