Cherokee is an innovative, feature rich, flexible and yet easy to configure, lightweight open source web server. It is implemented entirely in C, and has no dependencies beyond a standard C library.
Cherokee is an extremely fast, flexible and embeddable web server.
Cherokee is very light, completely modular and it can be tailored to your specific needs. It is multi-platform, offering native performance for Linux, Unix, and Windows operating systems.
Key Features
- Cherokee-Admin, a powerful Web interface.
- Low memory footprint.
- TLS and SSL.
- Virtual servers.
- URL rewriting and redirections supporting regular expressions.
- Authentication via htdigest, htpasswd, LDAP, MySQL, PAM, plain, and fixed list
- Reverse HTTP proxy – dispatches in-bound network traffic to a set of servers, and presents a single interface to the requesters.
- HTTP load balancing.
- Traffic shaping.
- Built-in support for efficient caching mechanisms.
- Custom and Apache compatible log format.
- Ability to launch web applications on demand.
- Audio/video streaming:
- Automatic Traffic Shaping.
- Seeking support.
- On the fly gzip and deflate compressions.
- Resilient to the 10,000 simultaneous connections barrier.
- Server Side Includes (SSI).
- CGI.
- FastCGI.
- SCGI.
- uWSGI support.
- LDAP.
- chroot support.
- RRDtool statistics.
- Database bridging and sharding (DBSlayer-like, DBSlayer is a database abstraction and pooling layer designed to be simple to use).
- Graphical configuration interface.
- Point & click deployments through an application market.
- Deploy Web Apps.
- Cherokee-Tweak – rotate the logs with no downtime.
- Zero Downtime Updates.
- Generate temporal URLs to serve hidden files.
- X-Sendfile is a special, non-standard HTTP header that has been supported by Cherokee for a while.
- Configuration wizards.
- Slowloris resilient.
- Advanced template subsystem used for both the Advanced Virtual Hosting module and the Custom logger.
- Internationalization support: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Catalan, and Galician.
Website: cherokee-project.com
Support: Documentation
Developer: Alvaro Lopez Ortega
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Cherokee is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Web Servers | |
|---|---|
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server powering the top web sites |
| Apache | Like nginx, Apache is a hugely popular web server |
| Caddy | Powerful, enterprise-ready web server written in Go |
| Lwan | Experimental, scalable, high performance HTTP server |
| H2O | Optimized HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 server |
| Tengine | Distribution of nginx |
| lighttpd | Fast, compliant and very flexible low memory footprint web server |
| Ferron | Web server optimized for speed, security and efficiency |
| Angie | Scalable web server that was forked from nginx |
| Algernon | Small self-contained pure-Go web server |
| Node.js | Server-side JavaScript environment for network applications |
| Hiawatha | Web server that focuses on security |
| OpenLiteSpeed | Lightweight HTTP server |
| rwasa | Full-featured high performance web server |
| devd | Local web server for developers |
| Cherokee | Fast, flexible and embeddable web server |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

