In this case, make sure you copy the configuration files to where httpd will look for them. Finally, as a root make a call to httpd, with a -f to the full path to the httpd.conf file. The server should be running. To stop the server, you need to know the pid of its process. It's stored in the location defined by PidFile directive in the httpd.conf.
Security Running a Web server poses security risks.
The Apache server is started by root, however before it spawns child processes that will handle hits the parent process changes its uid and gid to values specified by User , and Group directives. By default these directives are set to nobody, and nobody respectively, meaning that the owner of the child processes is nobody. This reduces the risk, which would be considerably higher if the owner of the child processes were root. However, creating a special user only for this purpose could further reduce the security risk associated with the ownership over the child processes. The name of the user could be something like webuser.