Busybox HTTPD¶

• See RM #1013

Pros¶

• Very small binary/runtime
• Supports Basic Auth
• Supports CGI via php-cgi

Cons¶

• No default conf file.
  • Must read source to understand server configuration
• Requires an init script to be written for it.
• Must pass port number on command line or at compile time (re: not a configurable item)
• Not much recent activity
• Doesn't support external basic auth file - changes to authentication must be stored in the httpd.conf file with the rest of the configuration.

lighttpd - WINNER¶

• See RM #1014

Pros¶

• actively developed
• Buildroot installation has sample conf files.
  • Includes default init script
• Server port is runtime configuration option
• Server user/group is runtime configuration option
• Can disable logging in conf file

Cons¶

• Configuration is more complex than Monkey.
  • Multiple conf files
  • Multiple modules for features

Summary¶

I was able to bring this one up very quickly and it was serving my PHP and JS files. Because it uses a slightly different config for htdigest I need to update both it's config and the code for piboxwww to allow authentication to work properly. But this is all very doable. I can also remove the monkey opkg dependency on piboxwww since lighttpd will be included in the dev system now.

So lighttpd will be the replacement for monkey.

hiawatha¶

• https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/

Pros¶

• Has some recent activity
• Per-directory authentication files

Cons¶

• Big jump between latest release and recent releases in same release cycle (11.x)
• Configuration is more complex than Monkey, but not as bad as lighttpd.

lighttpd seems the best choice so far. I've modified the default config script to disable logging and various other things, set the port to 2001 and manually installed the piboxwww files because the opkg install depends on the Monkey opkg. That will have to be fixed if we go this route.

After all that, I have the front page attempted to be displayed, but the action icons are missing. So I need to enable error and debug logging to see if that tells me anything.