Virtual Servers

A Virtual Server can be thought of the abstraction of serving up a content tree ( "docroot" in apache speak). There are a set of attributes that are used to define a virtual server. These attributes are used to decide which virtual server will process a client's request. Then there are attributes which define how the content is served.

A virtual server must have a docroot. The virtual tag in the config file has a docroot attribute that must be set.

<virtual docroot=PATH> ... </virtual>
There can be as many virtual sections in the configuration file as one likes.

Global config entities

md5: This enables the generation of the Content-MD5: header. This greatly increases the cost of creating a cached response for this virtual, because the MD5 function must be applied to the entire content of the response. Once the response is created, though, there is no per-request overhead.
prepop: This will cause phhttpd to traverse the entire docroot at initialization time and prepare cached responses for all the files it finds. This happens in the back ground during normal operation, so there is no dramatic increase in the time it takes for phhttpd to start serving connections.
name: This tag surrounds the string that will be used to identify the server. This string will be compared to the Host: header given in the request from the client, or will be compared to the 'host part' of the full URL if that was given. This will be used in combination with the network address and port pair to determine if a request should be served by a virtual server.
listen v4=DOT.TED.QU.AD port=PORT: This virtual server will be chosen to serve an incoming request if that request was made to the network address specified in this entity. There can be as many of these as one likes in a given virtual server, and '*' may be specified for either parameter to indicate that all addresses or ports should match.
logs: The logs section of the virtual server define the per virtual log files that should be written to during operation. See the following section on logging.