The
program reads a
HTTP
request from the standard input, and sends a reply to the standard output.
Besides ~user translation and virtual hosting support (see below), all file
requests are from
slashdir
directory.
The server uses
myname
as its name, which defaults to the local hostname, obtained from
gethostname(3)
(but see the
-v
option for virtual hosting.)
writes logs to
syslog(3)
using the ftp facaility (but see the
-s
option for testing.)
is designed to be small, simple and relatively featureless,
hopefully increasing its security.
OPTIONS
The following options are available:
-b
This option enables daemon mode, where
detaches from the current terminal, running in the background and
servicing HTTP requests.
-C suffix cgihandler
This option adds a new CGI handler program for a particular file type.
The
suffix
should be any normal file suffix, and the
cgihandler
should be a full path to an interpreter.
This option is the only way to enable CGI programs that exist
outside of the cgibin directory to be executed.
Multiple
-C
options may be passed.
-c cgibin
This option enables the CGI/1.1 interface.
The
cgibin
directory is expected to contain the CGI programs to be used.
looks for URL's in the form of
/cgi-bin/<scriptname>
where
Aq scriptname
is a valid CGI program in the
cgibin
directory.
In other words, all CGI URL's must begin with
/cgi-bin/
Note that the CGI/1.1 interface is not available with
~user
translation.
-e
This option causes
to not clear the environment when used with either the
-t
or
-U
options.
-f
This option stops the
-b
flag from
detaching from the tty and going into the background.
-H
This option causes directory index mode to hide files and directories
that start with a period, except for
..
Also see
-X
-I port
This option is only valid with the
-b
option.
It causes
port
to use used as the port to bind daemon mode.
The default is the
``http''
port.
-i address
This option is only valid with the
-b
option.
It causes
address
to use used as the address to bind daemon mode.
If otherwise unspecified, the address used to bind is derived from the
myname
which defaults to the name returned by
gethostname(3).
Only the last
-i
option is used.
-M suffix type encoding encoding11
This option adds a new entry to the table that converts file suffixes to
content type and encoding.
This option takes four additional arguments containing
the file prefix, its
``Content-Type''
``Content-Encoding''
and
``Content-Encoding''
for HTTP/1.1 connections, respectively.
If any of these are a single dash
(``-''
)
the empty string is used instead.
Multiple
-M
options may be passed.
-n
This option stops
from doing IP address to name resolution of hosts for setting the
REMOTE_HOST
variable before running a CGI program.
This option has no effect without the
-c
option.
-p pubdir
This option changes the default user directory for
/~user/
translations from
``public_html''
to
pubdir
-r
This option forces pages besides the
``index.html''
(see the
-X
option) page to require that the Referrer: header be present and
refer to this web server, otherwise a redirect to the
``index.html''
page will be returned instead.
-S server_software
This option sets the internal server version to
server_software
-s
This option forces logging to be set to stderr always.
-t chrootdir
When this option is used,
will chroot to the specified directory
before answering requests.
Every other path should be specified relative
to the new root, if this option is used.
Note that the current environment
is normally replaced with an empty environment with this option, unless the
-e
option is also used.
-U username
This option causes
to switch to the user and the groups of
username
after initialization.
This option, like
-t
above, causes
to clear the environment unless the
-e
option is given.
-u
This option enables the transformation of Uniform Resource Locators of
the form
/~user/
into the the directory
~user/public_html
(but see the
-p
option above).
-V
This option sets the default virtual host directory to
slashdir
If no directory exists in
virtualroot
for the request, then
slashdir
will be used.
The default behaviour is to return 404 (Not Found.)
-v virtualroot
This option enables virtual hosting support.
Directories in
virtualroot
will be searched for a matching virtual host name, when parsing
the HTML request.
If a matching name is found, it will be used
as both the server's real name,
[myname
]
and as the
slashdir
See the
Sx EXAMPLES
section for an example of using this option.
-X
This option enables directory indexing.
A directory index will be generated only when the default file (i.e.
index.html
normally) is not present.
-x index
This option changes the default file read for directories from
``index.html''
to
index
-Z certificate_path privatekey_path
This option sets the path to the server certificate file and the private key file
in pem format.
It also causes
to start SSL mode.
Note that in
versions 20031005 and prior that supported the
-C
and
-M
options, they took a single space-separated argument that was parsed.
since version 20040828, they take multiple options (2 in the case of
-C
and 4 in the case of
-M .
INETD CONFIGURATION
As
uses
inetd(8)
by default to process incoming TCP connections for HTTP requests
(but see the
-b
option),
has little internal networking knowledge.
(Indeed, you can run it on the command line with little change of functionality.)
A typical
inetd.conf5
entry would be:
This would serve web pages from
/var/www
on both IPv4 and IPv6 ports.
The
:600
changes the
requests per minute to 600, up from the
inetd(8)
default of 40.
Using the
Nx inetd(8),
you can provide multiple IP-address based HTTP servers by having multiple
listening ports with different configurations.
NOTES
This server supports the
HTTP/0.9HTTP/1.0
and
HTTP/1.1
standards.
Support for these protocols is very minimal and many optional features are
not supported.
can be compiled without CGI support (NO_CGIBIN_SUPPORT), user
transformations (NO_USER_SUPPORT), directory index support (NO_DIRINDEX_SUPPORT),
daemon mode support (NO_DAEMON_MODE), and dynamic MIME content
(NO_DYNAMIC_CONTENT), and SSL support (NO_SSL_SUPPORT) by defining the listed
macros when building
.
HTTP BASIC AUTHORISATION
has support for HTTP Basic Authorisation.
If a file named
.htpasswd
exists in the directory of the current request,
will restrict access to documents in that directory
using the RFC 2617 HTTP
``Basic''
authentication scheme.
Note:
This does not recursively protect any sub-directories.
The
.htpasswd
file contains lines delimited with a colon containing
usernames and passwords hashed with
crypt(3),
for example:
On
Nx ,
the
pwhash(1)
utility may be used to generate hashed passwords.
While
distributed with
Nx has support for HTTP Basic Authorisation enabled by default,
in the portable distribution it is excluded.
Compile
with
``-DDO_HTPASSWD''
on the compiler command line to enable this support.
It may require linking with the crypt library, using
``-lcrypt''
SSL SUPPORT
has support for SSLv2, SSLv3, and TLSv1 protocols that is included by
default.
It requires linking with the crypto and ssl library, using
``-lcrypto -lssl''
To disable SSL SUPPORT compile
with
``-DNO_SSL_SUPPORT''
on the compiler command line.
FILES
looks for a couple of special files in directories that allow certain features
to be provided on a per-directory basis.
In addition to the
.htpasswd
used by HTTP basic authorisation,
if a
.bzdirect
file is found (contents are irrelevant)
will allow direct access even with the
-r
option.
If a
.bzredirect
symbolic link is found,
will perform a smart redirect to the target of this symlink.
The target is assumed to live on the same server.
If a
.bzabsredirect
symbolic link is found,
will redirect to the absolute url pointed to by this symlink.
This is useful to redirect to different servers.
EXAMPLES
To configure set of virtual hosts, one would use an
inetd.conf5
entry like:
and inside
/var/vroot
create a directory (or a symlink to a directory) with the same name as
the virtual host, for each virtual host.
Lookups for these names are done in a case-insensitive manner.
To use
with PHP, one must use the
-C
option to specify a CGI handler for a particular file type.
Typically this, this will be like:
The
program was first written in perl, based on another perl http server
called
``tinyhttpd''
It was then rewritten from scratch in perl, and then once again in C.
The focus has always been simplicity and security, with minimal features
and regular code audits.
This manual documents
version 20100621.