Recently, I wanted to try some alternative for a home web service.
Not that the “stanart” Apache did not suit me with something — I just wanted to broaden my horizons and, perhaps, find a better alternative.
The candidate had to meet the simple requirements - low resource consumption and high speed.
Since Nginx , lighthttpd and LiteSpeed I already touched at one time, and knew about what to expect from them - the choice fell on the Spanish development of Cherokee .

Initially, the article was planned as a comparison of two "Indians" - but in the process of installing and configuring Cherokee, I ran into a pair of pitfalls. So this article is introductory, so to speak.
Performance comparison will also be - but a little later.

So, Cherokee.
As written on the official website, this is an innovative, easily configurable web server with a large number of features. Let's start the installation and take a closer look at it.
And immediately waiting for us

Underwater stone №1.

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It consists in choosing a source for installation. Options, as usual, 3:

• use standard system repositories;
• use ppa;
• compile from source codes;

I dismissed the third option right away - tea, not Gentoo , and decided to install from the standard repository:

sudo apt-get install cherokee php5-fpm

As it turned out later, in the standard Ubuntu repository there is a rather old version that does not really work with PHP-fpm (the old 2010 bug - the Cherokee configurator cannot find the PHP-fpm config in the system).
Therefore - you need to install from PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cherokee-webserver/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cherokee cherokee-admin

After installation, we start the Cherokee admin panel (a separate Python-based web service, you need to start it only while configuring Cherokee - it doesn’t need it all the time) and go to the URL that the command will give (by default - http://127.0.0.1) : 9090 ):

sudo cherokee-admin

On my home server, my WordPress stand-blog is spinning — so we need to configure Cherokee to work with PHP-fpm, and to serve WordPress.
There are a lot of manuals online on how to do this, but I didn’t find detailed step-by-step instructions and spent a couple of hours trying to get everything in working order.

Underwater stone №2.

Behavior to handle php files should always be on top (a real man, what).
This is how the Behavior for WordPress settings should look like:



Note that directory processing rules contain relative paths.
That is, in Apache terms, if you have a DocumentRoot for VirtualHost WordPress showing in / var / www / html / blog / - you do not need to specify the full path, it will not work. Specify as in the screenshot: / wp-content, / wp-includes, / wp-admin.

Summarize.

To set up Cherokee for WordPress maintenance, you need to install Cherokee itself, PHP-fpm, and configure the web service via cherokee-admin:

- add a new Source for PHP-fpm (if Cherokee did not pick it up itself), for this, go to the Sources menu at the top, on the left click on the “+” sign and fill in the fields:

• Nick: PHP Interpreter
• Connection: 127.0.0.1:9000
• Type: Local Interpreter
• Interpreter: / usr / sbin / php5-fpm --fpm-config /etc/php5/fpm/main.conf

The way we rule according to your surroundings.

- we add Virtual Server, for this we go to the top of the vServers menu, click on the “+” sign on the left and fill in the fields:

• Nick: yoursite.com (ServerName equivalent in Apache)
• Document root: / absolute / path / to / files

Click on Add, go to the Basics tab, register index.php in the Directory Indexes field
Go to the Behavior tab, click on Rule Management, add a rule for PHP:

• Rule type: Extensions
• Extensions: php

Handler tab:

• Handler: FastCGI
• Balancer: Round Robin (when selecting an item below, our Source should be loaded)

In the same way, we add Directory type rules for wp-admin , wp-includes and wp-content , and choose List & Send as Handler.

Everything, we press SAVE and we check in the browser that the site works.

In the next article, I will look at the performance differences between Apache and Cherokee based on the same WordPress, do not switch.