Cherokee webserver

Has anyone here:

a) Used the Cherokee webserver - it looks really good and gets lots of praise from people:
http://www.cherokee-project.com/

b) Tried to run MODx on it? It supports PHP via FastCGI and will connect to MySQL but I haven’t tried it so I have no idea if it would work or not.

Anyone tried it?

We just installed Cherokee today, and everything is running great with PHP (via FCGI) and MySQL! I’m liking it quite a bit, actually - especially the admin.

Now we just have to figure out Cherokee’s redirect/rewrite rules (since mod_rewrite obviously won’t work) so we can turn friendly URLs back on... can anyone out there help with this one?

I found this google group http://groups.google.com/group/cherokee-http/browse_thread/thread/d52e18858741a566

Go it working... it’s actually not that bad.

Quickly...

• Select the domain you have ModX installed on and go to Behaviors
• Create a new rule: File Exists, Match every file
• Then, when editing the rule itself:
  [list]
  [li]Under Rules[list]
  [li]For "File Exists" turn off all check boxes except "match all files" then click on the "not" ... this makes the rule match any file or directory that doesn’t exist.
• IF ModX is installed in a subdirectory, click "and" to add another matching rule (the new rule should display outside the red box)
• For the new rule select "Regular Expression"
• Write your regular expression, be sure to escape all metacharacters. Example: if ModX is installed at domain.com/myfolder/modx/ then your regular expression will look like this: ^\/myfolder\/modx\/.*$ ...this will match anything under that directory

[/li]
[li]Under Handler

• Select "Redirection"
• Show should be set to "internal" ... but you can set it to "external" while testing to see what is happening
• Regular Expression: if ModX is at the root, set this to ^\/(.*)$ ...if ModX is in a subdirectory, it will be set to something like: ^\/myfolder\/modx\/(.*)$
• Substitution should be set to: /myfolder/modx/index.php?q=$1

[/li]
[/list][/li][/list]

That should be all there is to it... ...although this breaks with any GET variables: i.e. domain.com/myfile.html?myvariable=something will give you a 404... another or a more involved regular expression should take care of that... ... ... almost there!

Thanks for reporting. Out of curiosity, why Cherokee as opposed to something like nginx or lighty? (The reason I ask is that it seems there’s more proven large sites like wordpress.com and rambler.ru running nginx, and I’d never heard of Cherokee before.)

This looks really interesting.

I suspect the reason for looking at Cherokee rather than NGINX etc. is because of the admin interface which comes with it.

Yeah - a friend (and someone I trust about this kind of thing) was raving about Cherokee the other day, "I’ll never install Apache on one of my own sites ever again."- so I dug around looking at info about apache alternatives (nothing very in depth). For Cherokee, I liked the performance numbers I was seeing and the web-based admin, so decided to give it a shot at one of my jobs. There we are in the middle of setting up a new server that will eventually house all of our redone websites (using modx of course). I figured that now, before anything is live, would be the best time to test an Apache alternative. Cherokee was installed and running in about an hour (another IT guy did it, he researched it and installed on a dev server first so he knew what he was doing), and everything seems to be working great. After working with it for just yesterday afternoon, I’m really liking the web-based admin. Speed seems comparable (no definitive testing, though). Aside from the friendly URLs thing, everything worked fine... and that one hiccup is understandable as Cherokee handles redirects differently.

Thanks for the feedback. Very interesting indeed.

UPDATE: my regex knowledge is getting a little better... here are settings that will allow for GET variables in the URL:

In the Rule settings under Handler -> Redirection:

REGULAR EXPRESSION:
with subfolders:

without subfolders:


SUBSTITUTION:
with subfolders:

without subfolders:

UPDATE: my regex knowledge is getting a little better... here are settings that will allow for GET variables in the URL:

Are those rules valid for Revo as well?

btw, I’ve problem running Revo on WebFaction...getting 500 errors. >:(