Documentation Source Text

Newer versions of althttpd can operate stand-alone.  Althttpd
itself listens on port 80 for incoming HTTP requests, then forks
a copy of itself to handle each inbound connection.  Each connection
is still handled using a separate process.  The only difference is
that the connection-handler process is now started by a master
althttpd instance rather than by xinetd or stunnel4.

Althttpd has no configuration file.  All configuration is handled
using command-line arguments.

Althttpd does not itself handle TLS connection.  For HTTPS, althttpd
relies on stunnel4 to handle TLS protocol negotiation, decryption, and
encryption.

Because each althttpd process only needs to service a single

If the -logfile option is given on the althttpd command-line, then a single
line is appended to the named file for each HTTP request.
The log file is in the Comma-Separated Value or CSV format specified
by [RFC4180](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180).
There is a comment in the source code that explains what each of the fields
in this output line mean.

The fact that the log file is CSV makes it easy to import into
SQLite for analysis, using a script like this:

>
    CREATE TABLE log(
      date TEXT,             /* Timestamp */
      ip TEXT,               /* Source IP address */
      url TEXT,              /* Request URI */
      ref TEXT,              /* Referer */
      code INT,              /* Result code.  ex: 200, 404 */
      nIn INT,               /* Bytes in request */
      nOut INT,              /* Bytes in reply */
      t1 INT, t2 INT,        /* Process time (user, system) milliseconds */
      t3 INT, t4 INT,        /* CGI script time (user, system) milliseconds */
      t5 INT,                /* Wall-clock time, milliseconds */
      nreq INT,              /* Sequence number of this request */
      agent TEXT,            /* User agent */
      user TEXT,             /* Remote user */
      n INT,                 /* Bytes of url that are in SCRIPT_NAME */
      lineno INT             /* Source code line that generated log entry */
    );
    .mode csv
    .import httplog.csv log
    

The filename on the -logfile option may contain time-based characters 
that are expanded by [strftime()](https://linux.die.net/man/3/strftime).
Thus, to cause a new logfile to be used for each day, you might use
something like:

>

>
    althttpd -root ~/www -port 8080

The "-port 8080" option is what tells althttpd to run in stand-alone
mode, listening on port 8080.

The author of althttpd has only ever used stand-alone mode for testing.
Since althttpd does not itself support TLS encryption, the
stunnel4 setup is preferred for production websites.