By Leland Vandervort on Thursday, April 29 2010, 13:48
(Translator's note: Taskigi Sequoyah would be proud! ;) )
A friend had explained to me that he had just finished installing a web server. Having decided on a change and not to use the mammoth Apache that everyone knows and loves, my friend seemed to have found a decent alternative. Bearing the name Cherokee, it appeared much leaner and with greater performance than Apache. See the benchmarks from the project website at the end of this article.
Personally, I had no knowledge of Cherokee, though I had certainly heard the name pandered around once or twice, but I never really paid it any attention at the time. So to give it a whirl, I decided to install it locally, which to my surprise exceeded my expectations. On a debian (or derived) distribution, installation is achieved by a simple apt-get install cherokee
(or 'aptitude'...)
The web management interface provided is clean and intuitive. The basic idea is quite interesting; It is possible to activate the PHP interpreter with a simple mouse click; same for activating different virtual hosts as well as other options. There are also wizards to assist with the installation of such applications and frameworks as Django, Rails or Wordpress, etc.
I thought that it would be interesting to present this project during a developers meeting at Gandi, especially for those who use GandiAI. The presentation was well received. After a few pow-wow, and a glance through the source code, there was nothing really unusual or risky. This doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't any bugs in it, but at any rate clean code is a good sign! The core is written in C with the administrator interface written in Python.
Thus is the way in which Cherokee made its appearance at Gandi, and a server image was produced. In this way you can rapidly test a server with Cherokee pre-installed.
We have also added an "expert" mode distribution with Cherokee pre-installed... You need only to select this distribution during the steps to create your server. And, just as a reminder, in case you haven't yet tried our service, you can always request a free trial using our online form!
For further information about Cherokee, you can visit the project website. Additionally, you can find a comprehensive article about Cherokee in the Gnu/Linux magazine France, written [in French] by Carl Chenet in issue number 125.
