Install Cherokee from PPA

Lately I've been researching different options for web servers and I've been keeping my eye on Cherokee. I've been watching it for some time and have seen that the project is very active, but so far I haven't tried it out. After checking that the Ubuntu repositories did not contain the latest version Cherokee I decided to look for a PPA. Thankfully there is an up to date PPA with packages for all the latest distributions of Ubuntu. Here are the steps that got me set up on Ubuntu 10.04:

1. Add the PPA to our sources.list. If you are running 9.10 and above you can run this command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cherokee-werbserver/ppa

But if you are running 9.04 or lower you will need to add them manually:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cherokee-webserver/ppa/ubuntu UBUNTU_VERSION main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/cherokee-webserver/ppa/ubuntu UBUNTU_VERSION main

2. Now update sources and install Cherokee. It is only necessary to install cherokee. The other two packages are for SSL and server statistics respectively.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cherokee libcherokee-mod-libssl libcherokee-mod-rrd

Once apt-get finishes you should have a fully functioning Cherokee web server. If you fire up your browser and head over to http://IP_ADDRESS_OF_MACHINE/ (e.g. http://localhost/ if you you are using the same machine that you installed on). You should be greeted with the Cherokee default page which is slightly more informative than Apache's "It Works."

Now you are of course wondering how to configure Cherokee right? Well apparently you really shouldn't have to edit configuration files by hand (see picture last paragraph). There is a very well put together web application distributed with Cherokee called cherokee-admin. This webapp can be deployed by opening a terminal and launching this command:

sudo cherokee-admin &

This will launch the webapp and give you the username, password, and URL with which you can access it. It is meant to be launched only when you need it for security and performance reasons. That was as far as I got with my install of Cherokee, but I will be trying out Drupal, Wordpress, and other CMS systems with it to see how well it performs.