16.12.2018

The Advent of Void: Day 16: darkhttpd

darkhttpd is a small webserver. Due to it’s design choices it is probably not a good fit for serving large sites but it is well suited for simple one-off tasks.

To start darkhttpd , run darkhttpd /path/to/wwwroot .

An exemplary use case, is to distribute xbps packages built on some box to more machines for testing, before pushing them to the void-packages :

$ darkhttpd hostdir/binpkgs/firefox darkhttpd/1.12, copyright (c) 2003-2016 Emil Mikulic. listening on: http://0.0.0.0:8080/

darkhttpd by defaults listens on port 8080, so to update the testing machines, running sudo xbps-install --repository=http://buildbox:8080 -Suy is all to be done.

As expected the files will be served and darkhttpd will log this information to stdout:

1544653860 192.168.1.15 "GET /x86_64-repodata" 304 136 "" "xbps/2.0" 1544653863 192.168.1.15 "GET /firefox-64.0_1.x86_64.xbps" 200 40882770 "" "xbps/2.0" 1544653863 192.168.1.15 "GET /firefox-64.0_1.x86_64.xbps.sig" 200 489 "" "xbps/2.0"

Be aware that that xbps-install requires packages from remote repositories to be signed with xbps-rindex.

In case a different port than 8080 is needed, this can be done via the --port flag. For privileged ports where darkhttpd has to be run from the root user, the flags --chroot , --uid and --gid should be considered.