Web server software allows computers to act as web servers. The first web servers supported only static files, such as HTML (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 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 in a web server to avoid featuritis. For example:

• TLS/HTTPS may be enabled with a separate stunnel daemon that terminates TLS and redirects raw HTTP packets to an http daemon.

• NGINX and OpenBSD httpd authors decided not to include CGI interpretation, instead using FastCGI. For OpenBSD, a slowcgi gateway was developed.

• 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

• Embedded HTTP server

• Gunicorn (HTTP server)

• Helicon Ape

References

External links

• Netcraft Web Server Survey

• Usage Statistics and Market Share of Web Servers for Websites