Install and Configure the Cherokee Web Server on Linux

Cherokee is one of the fastest and most flexible web server's available. Cherokee is able to gracefully handle many concurrent connections while maintaining a low memory footprint. It supports a large variety of technologies, features, load balancing capabilities, platforms, and provides an administration interface to configure your server and sites.

Installation

Installation of the Cherokee can be done easily with the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) package repository. To use this repository, execute the following as the root user:

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Once the EPEL repository is in use, Cherokee can be installed through yum.

yum install cherokee

Once installed, start Cherokee and add it to the default runlevel (to start at boot time).

/etc/init.d/cherokee start
chkconfig cherokee on

Configuration

Unlike Apache, Cherokee itself provides an interface for administering the web server. To start the admin interface, run the following command in the shell.

cherokee-admin -b

The output of this command will show the login pass, and URL. Similar to the following:

Login:
User: admin
One-time Password: qHJ3Ro3HvmGH9N6P

Web Interface:
URL: http://localhost:9090/

Cherokee Web Server 1.0.6 (Aug 6 2010): Listening on port ALL:9090, TLS
disabled, IPv6 enabled, using epoll, 4096 fds system limit, max. 2041
connections, caching I/O, single thread


Cherokee's admin will now be listening on port 9090 of your server, and can be access via your web browser on http://your-servers-ip:9090.

Click on the 'vServers' icon near the top of the page to configure virtual hosts. The required default host has a document root of "/var/www/cherokee". Additional sites can be added via the 'New' button on the Virtual Servers page. Manual configuration requires supplying the site's 'Nick' name (can use the site domain) and the document root.

Cherokee also has the ability to setup a new site for a specific conditions and applications as well. For example, you can choose from a list of popular content management systems.

For more detailed information on configuration, please refer to Cherokee's documentation.