Over the past week I’ve experimenting with light-weight HTTP servers. The reason for this experimentation is the fact that an embedded linux appliance is just too light weight to handle a full blown Apache server.

My plan is to utilize a light weight HTTP server is a management interface of my appliance, then use PHP in CGI or FastCGI mode to write my operational part of the appliance. Currently, my two main candidates were: lighthttpd (aka: lighty) and mini-httpd. Both of these are light weight, extremely small in their footprint and highly efficiant when it comes to serving up static HTML pages, which is usually required for the serving of a management interface.

While it would appear that voyage Linux, which is based upon Debian, has mini-httpd as part of its standard apt-get repostiroy, light-httpd isn’t a part of it. I’m currently still experimenting with these, as they are still throwing some issues and permission issues at me, but I believe I’ll solve these this week…