This section briefly describes the whole administration web interface
provided by cherokee-admin. This is
the only recommended way of configuring Cherokee. If you are looking
for development information, you should refer to the appropriate
section, especially the cherokee.conf
file specification.
We will first show a quick overview of the available options, followed
by a simple walkthrough. You can learn more about the options in their
specific documentation entries.
Overview
-
Status:
This gives a quick view of the server status.
-
General:
There are a number of entries that specify the most significant
configuration options such as the port - or ports - that the server
will listen to, the default timeout, whether to support keep-alive
connections and so on.
-
Virtual servers:
If you want your web server to work with more than one domain you
will have to create Virtual
servers other than the default one. Each one will have a
completely independent configuration: paths, behavior, logging
facilities, etc.
-
Information Sources:
Define the resources that will be providing information. For
instance, PHP.
-
Icons:
Associate icon images with one or more file extensions. Used to
offer directory listings.
-
Mime Types:
Manage MIME types.
-
Advanced:
This is to configure the most complex parameters of the server and how
it interacts with the operating system. If you are unsure about any of
the options here, better not mingle with them. Default values should
work just fine.
Walkthrough
There is very little set up you must do to have a perfectly functional
web server out of the box. Cherokee's default configuration can be
used to serve any typical PHP-driven dynamic website.
If you have a specific need, you should check out the recipes present in
the Cookbook section of the documentation. Among other subjects, you
can find information about
Cherokee optimizations,
setting up efficient Authentication
mechanisms, or configuring several popular application frameworks.
In this tutorial we will be setting up a system with a couple of
virtual servers, PHP support, some redirection rules and a simple
authentication mechanism.
To follow this walkthrough you need to be running
cherokee-admin. This is an
administration tool, so you will need system administrator rights.
# cherokee-admin
Login:
User: admin
One-time Password: yp7F1pMhtmD58DbB
Cherokee Web Server 0.99.3b2955 (Mar 10 2009): Listening on port ALL:80, TLS
disabled, IPv6 enabled, using epoll, 1024 fds system limit, max. 505
connections, caching I/O, 10 threads, 50 connections per thread, standard
scheduling policy
Now you can access the administration interface simply by opening your
web browser and visiting http://localhost:9090
The User and One-time Password will be required initially. This is to
prevent other users of the local host from being able to configure the
server unless they have access to the password. This is also very
useful to allow temporary access to a remote administrator.
If your user doesn't have enough privileges you will be notified. Also
if no configuration file exists you will be prompted to create one
with the default settings.
That is a good starting point. Right now your web server will not be
running yet. We will only be using two of the available tabs to adjust
some more settings: General and
Virtual Servers.
This is an example of what you'll be seeing:
Of course, once we're done we will have to apply our changes and
launch the server. The configuration changes must be submitted to the
server, be it automatically if possible or by using the appropriate form
submitting buttons. But no change is reflected in the configuration
file until you Save the changes. You can be sure of not damaging
anything while playing around with cherokee-admin. At least not
until you Save the changes. Note that, if the Cherokee server is
running, the applied modifications will only affect the instance being
executed if either Graceful restart or Hard restart are selected.
No restart simply modifies the configuration file, but doesn't affect
the currently running instance. A graceful restart will preserve the
old set up for any prior connections, while a hard restart will
kill every connection and instantly apply the changes.
This is what the General tab looks like:
We will only be modifying the Server Permissions. It usually is a
poor choice to run services with super user privileges. Set both
User and Group to www-data. Your system might already have
another user account specifically for the purpose of running a
webserver. Use that instead if so, or create the www-data user if
you don't already have one.
When you start, you will only have one virtual server called
default. You can begin by cloning it as example.
While you are at it you should also append the following line to your
/etc/hosts file (in Windows you will find this as
%WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts).
127.0.0.1 example.net example.org
This is to allow your system to resolve requests for example.net or
example.org locally. Of course, once you are out in the Wild (you
know, in the Internet), you will need proper DNS records.
-
default
-
We will leave default untouched except for the document root path,
which we will change. This is done through the Basics tab.
You could create by hand /var/www/default for example and set it up
in the appropriate field.
If you access your machine by IP or a DNS resolution points in that
direction for any particular domain, the contents of your document
root directory will be exposed (/var/www by default unless you
changed that during the build process). Whenever there is no match for
a virtual server specifically defined in your list, the default
virtual server will be the one responding.
Right now any file with the php extension will be served after being
processed by the PHP interpreter (you should have php-cgi installed
in your system for this, though).
Any requested file would be sent. If a directory is requested, a file
called index.php or index.html will be served if it is present (the
search will be performed in that order; you can configure this in the
Basics tab). If not, a directory listing is offered instead. If you
would want to prevent this behavior but would like to keep up
serving whatever content is requested directly, simply change the
List & Send handler for the Static Content handler.
-
example
-
For now this virtual server is an exact copy of the untouched
default virtual server. Create some new directories
/var/www/example and /var/www/example/auth, and configure the
first one as default document root path.
Next, setup example.net and example.com in the Domain names tab.
We'll erase everything in the Targets list within the Behavior
tab, except the default rule. With this we'll only be able to serve
static content.
Accessing the URL http://example.org should now show a list of
available files and directories under /var/www/example/.
Now lets password protect the auth directory. Add a new Directory
class rule pointing to /auth. Then, through the Security tab, add
a Validation Mechanism under Authentication.
The field Realm is mandatory. Lets set it as Secured Area.
If you choose PAM and impose no more restrictions, only users with
a local account in your system will be able to access the secured zone
at http://example.net/auth
Other mechanisms would work in a similar fashion but with their
specific requirements. For example, had you chosen Plain text file
instead of PAM you would have had to specify a Password File.
For example, it could have been /var/www/passwords.txt with the
following contents:
testuser1:password1
testuser2:password2
Note that the rule must not be flagged as Final, or else no other
rules will be applied afterwards and no access will be given to any
contents. This is because at this point we have not defined any
handler for the /auth rule and nothing would be served.
Refer to the Cookbook for detailed
examples on the different options.
Lastly, lets configure a redirection rule by choosing a "Regular
Expression" as the new rule type. Type the following regex: ^/rss.*$
Then, within the Handler selection tab specify a target: /feed
Any rule type can be used with the redirection handler: Directory,
Extensions, Regular Expression, etc. In this case the fact that the
rule type is "Regular Expression" affects only slightly. Refer to the
appropriate section of the documentation,
Redirection Handler, for more
details.
Note that the Type of the Redirection is External. This means
the server will instruct the requesting web client to fetch the
redirected URL, which means the client will always know what the
final URL is. This also means the redirection can be done to servers
other than your own. If it were internal, the redirection would be
invisible (not showing the target URL), but it would be limited to
the same virtual server.
A much more general redirection could be one using these values:
Note that this rule would have to be external since example.com is
not among the domains managed by our configuration.
This would redirect every petition to a site hosted under
http://example.com/example.net. For instance, the request for
http://example.net/image.jpg would return
http://example.com/example.net/image.jpg.
If you need more details, Check out the documentation for the
redirection handler.