Cherokee is an open-source

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

web server that runs on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

, BSD variants, Solaris, , and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

. It is a lightweight, high-performance web server/

reverse proxy In computer networks, a reverse proxy is the application that sits in front of back-end applications and forwards client (e.g. browser) requests to those applications. Reverse proxies help increase scalability, performance, resilience and securi ...

licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

. Its goal is to be fast and fully functional yet still light. Major features of Cherokee include a graphical administration interface named ''cherokee-admin'', and a modular light-weight design. Independent tests have shown Cherokee to be better performing than Apache when serving up both static and dynamic content. Cherokee is maintained and developed by an

open source community The open-source-software movement is a movement that supports the use of open-source licenses for some or all software, as part of the broader notion of open collaboration. The open-source movement was started to spread the concept/idea of open ...

Features

Web server features

* TLS and SSL * Virtual servers *

URL rewriting In web applications, a rewrite engine is a software component that performs rewriting on URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), modifying their appearance. This modification is called URL rewriting. It is a way of implementing URL mapping or routing ...

and redirections supporting

regular expressions A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" o ...

Authentication Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user. In contrast with identification, the act of indicatin ...

via htdigest,

htpasswd .htpasswd is a flat-file used to store usernames and password for basic authentication on an Apache HTTP Server. The name of the file is given in the .htaccess configuration, and can be anything although ".htpasswd" is the canonical name. The f ...

LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Directory servi ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

, PAM, plain, and fixed list. * Reverse HTTP proxy * HTTP load balancing *

Traffic shaping Traffic shaping is a bandwidth management technique used on computer networks which delays some or all datagrams to bring them into compliance with a desired ''traffic profile''. Traffic shaping is used to optimize or guarantee performance, impro ...

* Custom and Apache compatible log format. * Ability to launch web applications on demand * Audio/video streaming * On the fly

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and i ...

and deflate compressions * Resilient to the 10000 simultaneous connections barrier *

Server Side Includes Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple interpreted server-side scripting language used almost exclusively for the World Wide Web. It is most useful for including the contents of one or more files into a web page on a web server (see below), using ...

(SSI) * CGI *

FastCGI FastCGI is a binary protocol for interfacing interactive programs with a web server. It is a variation on the earlier Common Gateway Interface (CGI). FastCGI's main aim is to reduce the overhead related to interfacing between web server and CGI ...

SCGI The Simple Common Gateway Interface (SCGI) is a protocol for applications to interface with HTTP servers, as an alternative to the CGI protocol. It is similar to FastCGI but is designed to be easier to parse. Unlike CGI, it permits a long-running ...

* uWSGI support *

chroot 



A chroot on Unix and Unix-like operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent  root directory for the current running process and its  children. A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot name (and therefore normall ...

support *

RRDtool RRDtool (''round-robin database tool'') aims to handle time series data such as network bandwidth, temperatures or CPU load. The data is stored in a circular buffer based database, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time. ...

statistics * Database bridging and

sharding A database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load. Some data within a database remains present in all shards, but so ...

DBSlayer-like
* Graphical configuration interface * Point & click deployments through an application market

Web applications

Configuration wizards are provided to automatically configure the web server to perform specific tasks, or run frameworks and applications. These provide support for:

PHP PHP is a 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 implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

through

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

, ColdFusion,

GlassFish GlassFish is an open-source Jakarta EE platform application server project started by Sun Microsystems, then sponsored by Oracle Corporation, and now living at the Eclipse Foundation and supported by Payara, Oracle and Red Hat. The supported v ...

, Django, Alfresco,

GNU Mailman GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

, .NET with Mono,

rTorrent rTorrent is a text-based BitTorrent client written in C++, based on the ncurses and libTorrent (not to be confused with libtorrent) libraries for Unix, whose author's goal is "a focus on high performance and good code". Technical detail ...

, Symfony, and

Zend Engine The Zend Engine is a compiler and runtime environment for the PHP scripting language and consists of the Zend Virtual Machine, which is composed of the Zend Compiler and the Zend Executor, that compiles and executes the PHP code. It was origin ...

, plus generic

Video Streaming Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of o ...

and

uWSGI uWSGI is an open source software application that "aims at developing a full stack for building hosting services". It is named after the Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI), which was the first plugin supported by the project. uWSGI is maintaine ...

Devices running Cherokee

During the last few years Cherokee has been adopted by numerous electronic device makes and IoT technology manufacturers. Some examples include GoPro action cameras and drones,

Xiaomi Corporation (; ), commonly known as Xiaomi and registered as Xiaomi Inc., is a Chinese designer and manufacturer of consumer electronics and related software, home appliances, and household items. Behind Samsung, it is the second largest m ...

action cameras,

Digi International Digi International is an American Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology company headquartered in Hopkins, Minnesota. The company was founded in 1985 and went public as Digi International in 1989. The company initially offered intelligen ...

's Internet of things kits, ATN Corporation's high-end rifle scopes, Defender's security cameras, etc. Since Cherokee is Open Source Software and does not require manufacturers to license the code, there is no way to know how many companies are embedding Cherokee in their products.

References

External links