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from the questions,-questions,-questions dept.
I'm putting this under security because i'd like to keep this a private server for family:
that said, I'm wondering if you fine people can help me with the best way to set up a web server in my house to host the files on my external hard drives for family members in other cities/countries while, again, keeping it private and secure over the internet.
I'm looking into ngrok for url handling, but am not sure exactly if this is the best way to go.
Can anyone save me time and possible heartache and failure and provide me (and possibly others) with a walk-through of which software to use. Would love to do something like free, but may have to get a paid unique domain from, say, ngrok, to make it easier for family members to connect up.
Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi... you're my only hope!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Friday January 19 2018, @11:23PM
I used Apache forever for the same reason — I already knew it so why change? — but eventually branched out and was glad I did. A few years back I had to run a server on a low-resource machine and wanted to save as much RAM as I could, so I finally had to start trying out alternatives and ended up using Lighttpd [wikipedia.org]. The low resource use is what attracted me to lighttpd, but I stayed with it for the configuration, convenience, and ease of use. It has plenty of features, though it deliberately avoids some things Apache does, like mod_perl and htaccess files, which is inconvenient if you're coming from apache, but makes it a lot saner and safer to configure for most users. I think the config format is probably going to be easier to read for a newcomer as well, since everything's in the general format of "feature.setting = value" instead of Apache's oddpseudo-html.
The biggest negative to this is the lack of htaccess, which makes it inconvenient to use in certain use cases. Specifically, if you're trying to run a webhost-esque setup where you're giving many users their own space to host files and want to allow them to be able to set different access rules, CGI locations, custom rewrite rules, etc. you're going to find lighttpd inferior because you have to manage everything through the config files. It's still doable, though you have to either make the config file edits yourself or sort of roll-your-own via some fancy scripting to generate the necessary configuration and use "include_shell" to run that config generator on start, but either way you still have to reload the httpd to update the changes, unlike the instant feedback of htaccess files.
Still, that's probably the least common use-case for most people running a webserver, so it's a minor nitpick. For my own personal use, the only special workaround I've had to make for lighttpd was a small 3-line bash script, named include_dir, that inserts "include filename" entries for all files in a given directory. I did it to emulate Debian's sites-enabled directory setup from Apache for configuration sorting and quick adding/removal of sites.