Web server software allows computers to act as
web server
A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initi ...
s. The first web servers supported only static files, such as
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
(and images), but now they commonly allow embedding of server side applications.
Some web application frameworks include simple HTTP servers. For example
the Django framework provides
runserver, and
PHP
PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...
has a built-in server. These are generally intended only for use during initial development. A production server will require a more robust HTTP front-end such as one of the servers listed here.
Overview
Features
Some features may be intentionally not included to web server to avoid
featuritis
Feature creep is the excessive ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, especially in computer software, video games and consumer and business electronics. These extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and ...
. For example:
* TLS/HTTPS may be enabled with a separate
stunnel
Stunnel is an open-source multi-platform application used to provide a universal TLS/SSL tunneling service.
Stunnel can be used to provide secure encrypted connections for clients or servers that do not speak TLS or SSL natively. It runs on ...
daemon that terminates TLS and redirects raw HTTP packets to http daemon.
* NGINX and OpenBSD httpd authors decided not to include CGI interpretation but instead use FastCGI. For OpenBSD was developed a ''slowcgi'' gateway.
* BusyBox httpd doesn't have automatically generated directory listing but it may be implemented as a CGI script
Operating system support
See also
*
Comparison of application servers
*
Embedded HTTP server
An embedded HTTP server is an HTTP server used in an embedded system.
The HTTP server is usually implemented as a software component of an application (embedded) system that controls and/or monitors a machine with mechanical and/or electrical p ...
*
Gunicorn (HTTP server)
*
Helicon Ape
Helicon Ape is a piece of software by Helicon Tech designed to introduce Apache functionality on IIS web servers. Helicon Ape was created as an ASP.NET module for IIS 7 (and higher), implementing functionality of more than 35 Apache modules, tha ...
References
External links
Netcraft Web Server SurveyUsage Statistics and Market Share of Web Servers for Websites
{{Web server software
Web Servers
Internet Protocol based network software