Cherokee HTTP Server

infobox software
name = Cherokee Web Server

author = Alvaro Lopez Ortega
developer = [http://cherokee-project.com/ Cherokee Project]
latest_release_version = 0.9.2
programming language = C
operating_system = Cross-platform
genre = Web server
license = GNU General Public License
website = http://cherokee-project.com/

Cherokee HTTP Server is a cross-platform Web server. It aims to be fast and fully-functional while remaining lightweight compared to alternative servers. It is written entirely in C. It is embeddable and extensible with plugins.

Released under the GNU General Public License, Cherokee is free software.

Brief history

Cherokee was started in 2001 by Alvaro López Ortega. The motivation was to build a new web server; something newer than NCSA HTTPd and not as big and heavy as Apache HTTP Server, both of which are now more than 10 years old. Currently, Cherokee is developed and maintained by an open community of developers.

Available versions

Cherokee's latest stable release is 0.8.1 19th of August 2008.The previous release, 0.6.1 was released on the 24th of March 2008.The most up-to-date version is always available through the [http://www.cherokee-project.com/svn/ SVN repository] of the Cherokee project.

Improvements in 0.6.1 since the previous stable series (0.5.x) include:
* Administration Interface: a new program called cherokee-admin was included to provide a user friendly web interface for server configuration.

* Speed boost (20% to 25% faster).

* Load balancing to distribute load between multiple servers.

* New authentication mechanisms.

* New documentation system and improved user documentation.

* cherokee-guardian, a recovery mechanism integrated to ensure the server is always up and running.

* New themes and icon sets.

Features

Cherokee's features include CGI execution, PHP execution with PHPCGI and FastCGI. It also supports logging and authentication.

Logging methods supported:
* NCSA
* W3C
* Combined

Authentication methods supported:
* plain
* htpasswd
* htdigest
* PAM
* MySQL
* LDAP

Cherokee can also handle redirections and virtual server configuration.

Configuration

Cherokee is configured by an administration interface called cherokee-admin.

All the configuration options are available on this interface, so there is no need for users to learn the grammar of any configuration format in order to edit the file by hand. Besides, the interface takes care of checking all the inputs, so even if the user eventually makes a mistake while configuring the server, it can warn him about it before committing the new configuration file.

Experimental features

* [http://www.cherokee-project.com/experiments Hardware logger for Cherokee]
* [http://www.cherokee-project.com/experiments u-Cherokee in a remote controlled car]
* [http://www.cherokee-project.com/experiments Cherokee webcam handler]
* [http://www.cherokee-project.com/experiments Graphical user application for Cherokee]

Sub-projects

There are sub-projects simultaneously developed within the Cherokee project.

u-Cherokee

u-Cherokee is Cherokee's micro edition version. It is designed to fit in really small devices with hard memory and power limitations. It's not available as a separate package but requires Cherokee to be compiled in a special way.

cget

cget is a web downloader for Cherokee.

External links

* [http://www.cherokee-project.com/ Cherokee official website]
* [http://www.cherokee-project.com/doc/ Cherokee online documentation]
* [http://www.cherokee-project.com/bugs/timeline Cherokee bug tracking system]