Question: MacOS X Bundled Apache Server or Embeded Web Server?

[Martin Baxter]

Andre Garzia wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I am building my soon to be released web application development thingy. 
> I am bundling all my libraries (and some third party with credits), docs 
> and example.
> 
> But since I talked with Dan and others during RevConWest, I decided that 
> the most important part of this package is the out-of-the-box 
> experience. The hardest thing about CGI and WebApps for rev users is 
> usually setting up the environment. The idea is to develop locally and 
> then deploy when ready. I can't really build this for Windows, I expect 
> help on that later. So the idea is that there's a home stack that sets 
> everything up.
> 
> Till today I was bundling the LiteSpeed Web Server 
> <http://www.litespeedtech.com> server with the package. The server would 
> be all set up out of the box so that you could just launch and play. The 
> problem is, the thing is not running CGIs, the plain old ones... they 
> run once, then the server deadlocks. ARGH!!!! I thought about using 
> cherokee web server <http://www.0x50.org/> but then, it comes out in 
> source form and when it compiles it hard code some paths for the dynamic 
> loading libraries, so you cannot really build it and then just bundle. 
> You must compile it for each installation. Thats the same trouble with 
> Lighttp <http://www.lighttpd.net/>, and building it with static options 
> makes a huge server like 158mb and still it hard code the paths.
> 
> The MacOS X Apache server is not ready for FastCGI, for that we need to 
> install the modules, which is easy. Actually thats not hard, simple 
> commands and a revolution made stack could drive that installation easy. 
> But again MacOS X out-of-the-box lacks the needed C compiler for that, 
> only those that installed XCode development tools have the needed stuff 
> to build Apache Modules.
> 
> So here I am. The little servers all have some trouble or another, the 
> MacOS X bundled one is fine, but again, you need to download 1GB XCode 
> tools just to build simple couple megs apache module...
> 
> any clue out there folks? is there any autoconf magician here that can 
> build a lighttp install with relative paths instead of absolute ones (I 
> tried and it didn't like).
> 
> Can we use otool to rewrite the linkers absolute path using a relative 
> one like we do for frameworks (using @executable_path).
> 
> Argh, I am looking for help.
> 
> Andre

Andre, I'm not sure if this qualifies as help but it sounds to me like 
you want to provide something similar to MAMP. It's a dev-server 
package. I think it comes as a precompiled binary package. System 
requirements are quoted as >= Panther, no mention of Xcode tools having 
to be available or not. Installation is very easy. It installs 
everything to its own folder (so it's easy to delete) runs on port 8888 
by default, can have its own web root if you want. Existing Apache 
installs are unaffected.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mamp
http://www.mamp.info/

Probably you have seen it? Maybe it's irrelevant. But just maybe this
will give you some ideas?

Martin Baxter