Ubuntu Manpage: yaws - yet another webserver

NAME

       yaws - yet another webserver

SYNOPSIS

       yaws [OPTIONS]

DESCRIPTION

       Yaws  is  fast lightweight webserver. It can run as daemon or in interactive mode where it is possible to
       directly interact with the webserver. Yaws is particularly good at generating dynamic  content.  See  the
       user docs for more information on that topic.

DAEMON/SERVER options

-i | --interactive
Interactive mode. This will start yaws in interactive mode with an erlang prompt. All error_logger
messages will be written to the tty as well in this mode. Use this when developing yaws code.

-w | --winteractive
Cygwin inteactive mode (werl)

-D | --daemon
Daemon mode. This will start yaws as a daemon.

--heart
This will cause the yaws system to be automatically restarted in case it should crash. This switch
also requires the --daemon switch to be present.

--heart-restart=C,T
This controls the number of restarts in a given time period that heart tolerates before refusing
to restart Yaws. By default, heart allows up to 5 restarts within a 60 second period before
refusing to restart Yaws again. This option allows up to C restarts in T seconds instead. To allow
infinite restarts, set both C and T to 0. This switch automatically enables the --heart switch.

--debug
Debug mode. This will produce some auxiliary error output for some error conditions. It will also
start the otp sasl lib for additional error printouts.

--nodebug
Non-debug mode. This is useful for running interactively via the -i option but without incurring
the performance penalties of debug mode.

--conf file
Use a different configuration file than the default. If the configuration parameter config is set,
yaws use it as default configuration file. Else, The default configuration file when running as
root is /etc/yaws/yaws.conf. When running as a non priviliged user, yaws will search for its
configuration file in the following order. First in $HOME/yaws.conf, then in ./yaws.conf and
finally in /etc/yaws/yaws.conf.

--runmod module
Tells yaws to call module:start/0 at startup. This makes it possible to startup user specific
applications together with yaws.

--pa path
Add path to the yaws system search path

--tracetraf
Traffic trace mode. All traffic will be written to a trace file called trace.traffic in the log
directory.

--tracehttp
HTTP trace mode. All HTTP messages will be written to a trace file called trace.http in the log
directory.

--traceout
When yaws is put into trace mode using either --tracetraf or --tracehttp, traces are written to
files. If we provide the --traceout flag, the trace will also be written to stdout.

--trace
Sames as --tracetraf --traceout. I.e. trace everything and write to stdout.

--mnesiadir dir
Start Mnesia in directory <dir>

--sname xxx
Start yaws as a distributed erlang node with name <xxx> using the unqualified hostname as nodename
postfix

--disable-kpoll
By default, yaws starts erlang with +K true. This flag reverses that.

--name xxx
Start yaws as a distributed erlang node with name <xxx> using the fully qualified hostname as
nodename postfix

--proto_dist Mod
Use module Mod for erlang distribution. This is typically only used when we want to run erlang
distribution over SSL.

--erlarg STRING
Pass STRING as an additional argument to the "erl" program. If STRING comprises multiple words,
you must quote it so that your shell passes it to yaws as a single argument. If STRING contains
any single quote characters, you must quote each of them as well. For example, to pass the option
-env NAME O'Keeffe to "erl" from a Bourne-compatible shell:

--erlarg "-env NAME O\'Keeffe"

--id ID
This flag sets the id. If we're starting a daemon (or an interactive system) it gives the Yaws
server the identity ID. This means that the server will write all internal files into the
directory $HOME/.yaws/yaws/ID.

Yaws also creates a file called $HOME/.yaws/yaws/ID/CTL which contains the portnumber the daemon
is listening on for control request by the control command such as "yaws --hup" etc.

If we're invoking a control command which should perform some control function on the daemon, we
may have to give the --id flag also to the control command. If we don't do this the control
command may interact with the wrong daemon due to finding the wrong "ctl" file.

The daemon may also optionally specify the "id" in the yaws.conf configuration file.

--umask MASK
Set the umask for the daemon to MASK.

--encoding latin|unicode
Set the config file encoding (default: latin1).

CONTROL OPTIONS

The following list of options are are used to control the daemon from the "outside" while it is running.

--hup [--id ID]
HUP the daemon. This forces the daemon to reread the configuration file. It also makes the daemon
empty all its internal content caches. Hence when updating the doc root, HUPing the daemon is the
fastest way to see the content updates.

--stop [--id id]
Stop the daemon (called id)

--ls Lists current ids and status of all yaws servers on localhost. In practice this amounts to a
listdir in $HOME/.yaws/yaws - and check whether the different systems who has created files there
are alive.

--status [--id id]
Query a running yaws daemon for its status, and print it.

--stats [--id id]
Query a running yaws daemon for its statistics, and print it.

--running-config [--id id]
Query a running yaws daemon for its current configuration, and print it. This can be useful when
attempting to figure out how to set config in embedded mode. Configure yaws to you liking in non-
embedded mode, run this command and use the output to populate the embedded mode records.

--load Modules [--id id]
Try to (re)load erlang modules into a running daemon. This is useful after modifying appmods or
modules used by scripts.

--debug-dump [--id id]
Produce a debug dump on stdout. In particular this code lists what we refer to as suspicious
processes. I.e. processes that might be hanging or processes that are "large" - hardcoded to 40k
words.

--ctltrace [--id ID] http | traffic | off
Control the trace capabilities of a running yaws daemon. If the http or traffic option is given,
the daemon will write a log for debug purposes into the logdir.

--wait-started[=T] [--id ID]
Waits at most 30 seconds for the server to start. Exits with 0 if server is running, 1 otherwise.
Typically useful in test scripts. The default 30 seconds can be modified by appending =T to the
option, where T is the desired number of seconds to wait for the server to start.

MISC OPTIONS

       --check YawsFile [IncDirs ....]
              Test  compile  a `.yaws' file. Useful in Makefiles when we want to ensure that all .yaws files are
              syntactically correct

       --version
              output version information and exit

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       HOME   Is used to determine where we write the temporary files. By  default  all  tmp  files  end  up  in
              $HOME/.yaws. This includes the JIT files that are the result of processed .yaws files and also the
              so called control file that is used by the daemon  to  write  the  port  number  to  which  it  is
              listening for control commands such as "yaws --status"

              Thus  HOME  is  the handle we use in the control commands to find the control file so that we know
              where to connect to.

       YAWSHOME
              Can be used to override the HOME variable. This is useful when we for  example  are  running  yaws
              under port binding programs such as authpriv.

              It's useful by distros that don't want Yaws to write any files ever in the HOME directory of root.

AUTHOR

       Written by Claes Wikstrom