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<meta name="Description" content="Cherokee is a flexible, very fast, lightweight Web server. It is implemented entirely in C, and has no dependencies beyond a standard C library. It is embeddable and extensible with plug-ins. It supports on-the-fly configuration by reading files or strings, TLS/SSL (via GNUTLS or OpenSSL), virtual hosts, authentication, cache friendly features, PHP, custom error management, and much more." />
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<h2 id="_a_href_index_html_index_a_8594_a_href_other_html_other_information_a"><a href="index.html">Index</a> → <a href="other.html">Other information</a></h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
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<h2 id="_other_frequently_asked_questions">Other: Frequently Asked Questions</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>Here is a list of the most frequently asked questions. Please refer to
the appropriate section of the documentation for more details.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq01">How to compile it</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre><tt>./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
make</tt></pre>
</div></div>
<h3 id="faq02">How to create dynamic modules</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>It’s the default way.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq03">How to configure the module xyz to be linked statically</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre><tt>./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc \
--localstatedir=/var \
--enable-static-module=xyz</tt></pre>
</div></div>
<h3 id="faq04">How to build everything statically</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre><tt>./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc \
--localstatedir=/var \
--enable-static-module=all</tt></pre>
</div></div>
<h3 id="faq05">How to create a self signed certificate for TLS</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre><tt>openssl req -days 1000 -new -x509 -nodes \
-out /etc/cherokee/ssl/cherokee.pem \
-keyout /etc/cherokee/ssl/cherokee.pem</tt></pre>
</div></div>
<h3 id="faq06">How to access cherokee-admin from a remote machine</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>cherokee-admin binds only to local loopback by default. There are some
workarounds:</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
Create an SSH tunnel. This is the recommended way. In order to do so
you must issue the following command:
</p>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre><tt>ssh -L 9090:localhost:9090 remote_IP</tt></pre>
</div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>After that you can access the remote interface through
<a href="http://localhost:9090">http://localhost:9090</a> and every request will be forwarded to the
remote IP running cherokee-admin.</p></div>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Launch cherokee-admin with the -b parameter in order to force it to
listen to all the network interfaces.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Finally you could always install cherokee on your local host,
configure it there and then copy the generated cherokee.conf file to
the device running the cherokee instance you wanted to set up.
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<h3 id="faq07">How to manually write configuration files without cherokee-admin</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The configuration file is a plain text file and its syntax is well
documented. Check the <a href="dev_cherokee.conf.html">cherokee.conf</a>
internal format information. Notice that manually editing the
configuration is not the recommended method, but the format will
always be kept updated to facilitate scripting tasks, working with
embedded devices and other similar situations.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq08">Does Cherokee speak WSGI natively like <tt>mod_wsgi</tt> does?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>In short: not like <tt>mod_wsgi</tt> at all. There is native support for the
<a href="http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/">uWSGI server</a>, which is a fast
(pure C), self-healing, developer-friendly WSGI server aimed for
professional python webapps deployment and development. Cherokee also
provides a wizard to adjust its settings to those defined in the uWSGI
configuration file of your project.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq09">I need to make an administration script: What signals are supported by Cherokee?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The list is documented in the <a href="other_signals.html">Signals</a> entry.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq10">Is there a clean way of switching Cherokee to Maintenance mode?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Check the <a href="cookbook.html">Cookbook</a>, there is a
<a href="cookbook_maintenance.html">recipe on the subject</a>.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq11">What licensing is used by the Cherokee web server?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cherokee is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2,
which can be found in the file <strong>COPYING</strong> distributed with the source
code. For more details, read the
<a href="https://github.com/cherokee/webserver/blob/master/COPYING">full
license</a> in the project’s Git repository.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>If for whatever reason this license does not suit your needs, other
licensing schemes can be negotiated on a particular basis. Contact
<a href="http://www.octality.com/">Octality</a> if this is your case.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq12">And what about the documentation?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The documentation is distributed under a
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Creative Commons
Attribution (by)</a> license, which is the most accommodating in terms of
what others can do with it. It lets others distribute, remix, tweak,
and build upon the work, even commercially.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq13">How can I contribute contents to the documentation?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The documentation is written and maintained using
<a href="http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/">AsciiDoc</a>, a text document
format for writing short documents, articles, books and UNIX man pages
that can be easily translated to HTML and DocBook markups. It is
really easy to get the hang of it, so if you want to contribute,
please take a look at the
<a href="http://powerman.name/doc/asciidoc">AsciiDoc Cheatsheet</a> and start
editing the documentation sources right ahead. They are distributed
with the source code and are located under <tt>./doc</tt> of the source tree.
If you don’t have GIT access, simply mail your contributions to
<a href="mailto:feedback@cherokee-project.com">feedback@cherokee-project.com</a> or create fork on github and request pull.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq14">Can encoders be set for specific file types?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Yes. Since content encoding is set on a per-rule basis, simply add a
rule at the beginning of the virtual server that matches the specific
file extensions and has the encoding enabled. Set the rule to be
non-final. That should do the trick.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq15">I can’t set TLS/SSL in Cherokee-Admin. There’s no TLS/SSL (and nothing in the pulldown) for me.</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>First, make sure openssl in installed. If you are not installing from
source, most likely you’ve missed installing libcherokee-mod-libssl</p></div>
<h3 id="faq16">Can I use an old configuration file with a new Cherokee release?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The answer is yes. Please refer to the
<a href="basics_upgrade.html">Upgrading Cherokee</a> section of the
documentation.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq17">I’m using *BSD and can’t compile Cherokee. What’s wrong?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Make sure you are building it with <tt>gmake</tt>.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq18">Why do I keep getting HTTP Error 400 while uploading files to a PHP back-end?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>PHP is configured by default to limit the size of uploaded
files. Check the <a href="cookbook_php.html#upload_limits">PHP upload
limits</a> note to tweak the appropriate settings.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq19">Why are my nicknames not matched, while *.example.com does work?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The Cherokee Virtual Server nickname is not the first thing that is
evaluated. In fact all the Host Matches are first evaluated from top
to bottom, then the nicknames from top to bottom, and on last resort:
Default.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>For example: a virtual server (<tt>A</tt>) with the nickname test.example.com, and
a second virtual server (<tt>B</tt>) with a hostmatch .*\.example.com. In this
example, the virtual server <tt>B</tt> will be matched first.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>If you are specifically looking for the virtual server <tt>A</tt> to be
matched first, you will have rely on it being matched by <tt>Host Match</tt>
instead of by nickname.</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><div class="title">Solution</div><ul>
<li>
<p>
Virtual Server A RegEx: ^test.example.com$
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Virtual Server B RegEx: .*\.example.com$
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Carefully read the way in which
<a href="config_virtual_servers.html#domain_names">host matches</a> are
performed if you still need further clarification.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq20">SSLv2 is ancient, OpenSSL 1.0.0+ doesn’t like it, how can I disable it?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Within cherokee-admin, in the Advanced Menu, you can find the option
to enable/disable SSLv2 all together. It is disabled by default. No
need to resort to special ciphers such
(<tt>ALL:!ADH:-LOW:-SSLv2:-EXP:-eNULL:@STRENGTH</tt>), or anythingh else for
that matter. If you need it, simply enable the check-box to allow
SSLv2.</p></div>
<h3 id="faq21">I’m used to Apache’s .htaccess. Will Cherokee ever support it?</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Short answer: No. Cherokee is designed to be efficient. Using
.htaccess is not: it’s not a scalable architecture at all, it’s
horrible for performance, you can’t use it with Cherokee, and even if
you could, you shouldn’t. If you need .htaccess, you’re probably doing
it wrong. For .htaccess to work, Apache has to check <strong>every</strong> directory
in the requested path for the existence of a .htaccess file, and if
present, read and parse <strong>every</strong> one of them. This happens for <strong>every</strong>
request. Sure, changes in .htaccess are effective instantly, but
that’s because Apache has to read and process the files every time. As
the requests dig deeper into the directory tree, the associated
overhead of stats an reads grows. And it is not negligible at all: an
increase in anything from 5 to 50 is usual for very typical
configurations.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Yes, the use of .htaccess is very extended. Yes, it has been around
for a while. No, that doesn’t mean it is a good architecture. There
are better ways of doing things. Converting the behavior of a
.htaccess file to an efficient set of rules for Cherokee is not
complicated.</p></div>
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