Installing the W3C Validator on Ubuntu 8.04

I recently installed the W3C validator on an Ubuntu 8.04 server, a task I had performed with little trouble in the past.  The new version of the package, however, behaves differently and left me wondering “now what”?  Here’s a quick little howto on getting it up and running using the apt-get repositories.

First we need to install the w3c-markup-validator package, using your favorite package manager, or from the command line like this:

sudo apt-get install w3c-markup-validator

This installs the perl scripts provided by the W3C as well as a CGI script to execute them and the templates used to display the results.  The problem we have with the new version of this package is that it won’t install the templates to the correct directory and it doesn’t turn on local subnet validation by default.  So let’s take care of both of those problems:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/validator
ln -s /usr/share/w3c-markup-validator/templates /usr/local/validator/templates
sudo vim /etc/w3c/validator.conf

In the validator.conf file we need to update the line that says “Allow Private IPs = no” to say “yes”.  This allows you to validate sites on the same machine as the validator.  We now have a functional copy of the W3C Validator running, but where do we go to access it?  By default you access it by going to “http://localhost/w3c-markup-validator/”.

So there you have it.  Now you can stop burning up the wires with your validation requests and get faster responses.