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 ${VARDIR}/run/yaws/ctl-${ID} 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.

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