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.
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.
Cherokee's latest stable release 0.5.6 ("All I want for Xmas is a new Cherokee release") was released on the 13th of December, 2006. Read the official release announcement. Important fixes since the previous release are:
* Little memory leak in iocache
* Content-Range header
* Time management fixed
* Non-free docs removed
* BSD compilation fix
* A few miscellaneous fixes
New features:
* Higher performance
* Support for local paths in the configuration
* sendfile() support improved
The latest development version is 0.6.0-beta1. Read the announcement.
The most up-to-date version is always available through the SVN repository of the Cherokee project.
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
Cherokee can also handle redirections and virtual server configuration.
Cherokee relies on several configuration files:
* advanced.conf
* cherokee.conf
* icons.conf
* mime.conf