phil wilson :: a geek commodity

9:32 PM

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Wednesday, December 03, 2003

The Abyss Web Server is tiny, fast, and pretty goddamn amazing. The Windows installer is 144k, and sets itself up, providing a web interface to all of its configuration.

Despite its tiny footprint (for example, the executable file size of the Windows version is less than 112 KB); it supports HTTP/1.1, dynamic content generation through CGI/1.1 scripts, Server Side Includes (SSI), custom error pages, and user access control (HTTP authentication/password protected files).

It also supports Perl, PHP, Python and ASP. From download to seeing the phpinfo() screen was about five minutes, and most of that was locating and following the documentation to get PHP working (I already had PHP installed).

It’s rare that software really impresses me, but this (free!) web server really is amazing. There’s no .htaccess, no virtual hosts, and (probably) no gzip compression, but if you’re using Apache for a small, simple site or you’re a beginner and you’re not using these features, this would suit you down to the ground. It’s amazingly simple. Really, really amazingly simple.