Web server software allows computers to act as
web server
A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...
s. The first web servers supported only static files, such as
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
(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 scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...
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. 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 is used to provide secure encrypted connections for clients or servers that do not speak TLS or SSL natively. It runs on a va ...
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
This list compares the features and functionality of application servers, grouped by the hosting environment that is offered by that particular application server.
C
* Enduro/X A middleware platform for distributed transaction processing, base ...
*
Embedded HTTP server
*
Gunicorn (HTTP server)
The Gunicorn "Green Unicorn" (pronounced jee-unicorn or gun-i-corn) is a Python (programming language), Python Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) Web server, HTTP server. It is a pre-fork (operating system), fork worker model, porting, ported f ...
*
Helicon Ape
References
External links
Netcraft Web Server Survey
Usage Statistics and Market Share of Web Servers for Websites
{{Web server software
Web Servers
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, initiates ...
Internet Protocol based network software