Document root is the directory that contains the files that the web server will send to the client, such as HTML and JPG files. The web servers httpd.conf file contains the document root. In this example, the document root is /opt/IBM/IHS/htdocs.
The document root directive must not end with a trailing forward slash.
DocumentRoot "/opt/IBM/IHS/htdocs"
In this example, the document root directory contains a single HTML file, index_ihs.html.
~]# ls /opt/IBM/IHS/htdocs
index_ihs.html
Since the document root directory contains index_ihs.html, when the client navigates to www.example.com/index_ihs.html, the content of the index_ihs.html file should be displayed in the clients browser.