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BOZOHTTPD(8) System Manager's Manual BOZOHTTPD(8)

NAME
bozohttpd -- hyper text transfer protocol version 1.1 daemon

SYNOPSIS
bozohttpd [-EGHVXdefhnqsu] [-C suffix cgihandler] [-I port]
[-L prefix script] [-M suffix type encoding encoding11]
[-m version] [-P pidfile] [-R readme] [-S version]
[-T type timeout] [-U username] [-Z cert privkey] [-c cgibin]
[-i address] [-p pubdir] [-t chrootdir] [-v virtualroot]
[-x index] [-z ciphers] slashdir [myname]

DESCRIPTION
The bozohttpd program reads a HTTP request from the standard input, and
sends a reply to the standard output. Besides ~user translation and vir-
tual hosting support (see below), all file requests are from slashdir di-
rectory. The server uses myname as its name, which defaults to the local
hostname, obtained from gethostname(3) (but see the -v option for virtual
hosting.) bozohttpd writes logs to syslog(3) using the ftp facility (but
see the -s option for testing and the -q option for suppressing this.)
bozohttpd is designed to be small, simple and relatively featureless, hope-
fully increasing its security.

OPTIONS
The following options are available:

-b Enables daemon mode, where bozohttpd detaches from the current
terminal, running in the background and servicing HTTP requests.

-C suffix cgihandler
Adds a new CGI handler program for a particular file type. The
suffix should be any normal file suffix, and the cgihandler
should be a full path to an interpreter. This option is the
only way to enable CGI programs that exist outside of the cgibin
directory to be executed. Multiple -C options may be passed.

-c cgibin Enables the CGI/1.1 interface. The cgibin directory is expected
to contain the CGI programs to be used. bozohttpd looks for
URL's in the form of /cgi-bin/<scriptname> where <scriptname> is
a valid CGI program in the cgibin directory. In other words,
all CGI URL's must begin with /cgi-bin/. Note that the CGI/1.1
interface is available with ~user translation using -E switch.

-d Enables debug support.

-E Enables CGI/1.1 interface for ~user translation. Note that en-
abling this support implies that users can run commands as the
web server user. This may have security implications.

-e Causes bozohttpd to not clear the environment when used with ei-
ther the -t or -U options.

-f Stops the -b flag from detaching bozohttpd from the tty and go-
ing into the background. This implies the -b flag.

-G Get the bozohttpd version string, print it on standard output,
and exit.

-H Causes directory index mode to hide files and directories that
start with a period, except for ... Also see -X.

-I port Causes bozohttpd to use port instead of the default "http" port.
When used with the -b option, it changes the bound port. Other-
wise it forces redirections to use this port instead of the
value obtained via getsockname(2).

-i address
Causes address to be used as the address to bind daemon mode.
If otherwise unspecified, the address used to bind is derived
from the myname, which defaults to the name returned by gethost-
name(3). Only the last -i option is used. This option is only
valid with the -b option.

-L prefix script
Adds a new Lua script for a particular prefix. The prefix
should be an arbitrary text, and the script should be a full
path to a Lua script. Multiple -L options may be passed. A
separate Lua state is created for each prefix. The Lua script
can register callbacks using the httpd.register_han-
dler('<name>', function) Lua function, which will trigger the
execution of the Lua function function when a URL in the form
http://<hostname>/<prefix>/<name> is being accessed. The func-
tion is passed three tables as arguments, the server environ-
ment, the request headers, and the decoded query string plus any
data that was sent as application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

-M suffix type encoding encoding11
Adds a new entry to the table that converts file suffixes to
content type and encoding. This option takes four additional
arguments containing the file prefix, its "Content-Type",
"Content-Encoding", and "Content-Encoding" for HTTP/1.1 connec-
tions, respectively. If any of these are a single dash ("-"),
the empty string is used instead. Multiple -M options may be
passed.

-m version
Set the minimum supported SSL protocol version. The valid val-
ues of version are "TLSv1.1", "TLSv1.2", and "TLSv1.3". The de-
fault version is "TLSv1.1".

-n Stops bozohttpd from doing IP address to name resolution of re-
mote hosts. This affects the REMOTE_HOST environment variable
for CGI programs and Lua scripts.

-P pidfile
Causes bozohttpd to create a PID file in pidfile when run in
daemon mode with the -b option.

-p pubdir Changes the default user directory for /~user/ translations from
"public_html" to pubdir.

-q Quiet mode - no log entries generated.

-R readme When directory indexing is enabled, include the contents of the
file readme in the footer of the directory index.

-S version
Sets the internal server version to version.

-s Forces logging to be set to stderr always.

-T type timeout
Set the timeout for type to timeout. The valid values of type
are "ssl timeout", "initial timeout", "header timeout", and
"request timeout". The default values are 30 seconds, 30 sec-
onds, 10 seconds and 600 seconds, respectively.

-t chrootdir
Makes bozohttpd chroot to the specified directory before answer-
ing requests. Every other path should be specified relative to
the new root, if this option is used. Note that the current en-
vironment is normally replaced with an empty environment with
this option, unless the -e option is also used.

-U username
Causes bozohttpd to switch to the user and the groups of
username after initialization. This option, like -t above,
causes bozohttpd to clear the environment unless the -e option
is given.

-u Enables the transformation of Uniform Resource Locators of the
form /~user/ into the directory ~user/public_html (but see the
-p option above).

-V Sets the backup virtual host directory to the slashdir argument.
If no directory exists in virtualroot for the request, then
slashdir will be used. The default behavior is to return 404
(Not Found.)

-v virtualroot
Enables virtual hosting support. Directories in virtualroot
will be searched for a matching virtual host name, when parsing
the HTML request. If a matching name is found, it will be used
as both the server's real name, [myname], and as the slashdir.
See the "EXAMPLES" section for an example of using this option.

-X Enables directory indexing. A directory index will be generated
only when the default file (i.e. index.html normally) is not
present.

-x index Changes the default file read for directories from "index.html"
to index.

-Z certificate_path privatekey_path
Sets the path to the server certificate file and the private key
file in PEM format. It also causes bozohttpd to start SSL mode.

-z ciphers
Sets the list of SSL ciphers (see SSL_CTX_set_cipher_list(3)).

Note that in bozohttpd versions 20031005 and prior that supported the -C
and -M options, they took a single space-separated argument that was
parsed. since version 20040828, they take multiple options (2 in the case
of -C and 4 in the case of -M.)

DEFAULT CONFIGURATION
On FreeBSD, bozohttpd can be enabled as the default web server by adding
the following options to /etc/rc.conf :

bozohttpd_enable (bool): Set it to "YES" to enable bozohttpd.
Default is "NO".
bozohttpd_flags (str): Options to pass to bozohttpd.
Default is "-b -t /var/empty -U nobody /".
The last argument, slashdir, is required.

INETD CONFIGURATION
As bozohttpd normally uses inetd(8) to process incoming TCP connections for
HTTP requests (but see the -b option), bozohttpd has little internal net-
working knowledge. (Indeed, you can run it on the command line with little
change of functionality.) A typical inetd.conf(5) entry would be:

http stream tcp nowait:600 www /usr/local/bin/bozohttpd httpd /var/www
http stream tcp6 nowait:600 www /usr/local/bin/bozohttpd httpd /var/www

This would serve web pages from /var/www on both IPv4 and IPv6 ports. The
:600 changes the requests per minute to 600, up from the inetd(8) default
of 40.

Using the FreeBSD inetd(8), you can provide multiple IP-address based HTTP
servers by having multiple listening ports with different configurations.

NOTES
This server supports the HTTP/0.9, HTTP/1.0, and HTTP/1.1 standards. Sup-
port for these protocols is very minimal and many optional features are not
supported.

bozohttpd can be compiled without CGI support (NO_CGIBIN_SUPPORT), user
transformations (NO_USER_SUPPORT), directory index support
(NO_DIRINDEX_SUPPORT), daemon mode support (NO_DAEMON_MODE), dynamic MIME
content (NO_DYNAMIC_CONTENT), Lua support (NO_LUA_SUPPORT), and SSL support
(NO_SSL_SUPPORT) by defining the listed macros when building bozohttpd.

HTTP BASIC AUTHORIZATION
bozohttpd has support for HTTP Basic Authorization. If a file named
.htpasswd exists in the directory of the current request, bozohttpd will
restrict access to documents in that directory using the RFC 2617 HTTP
"Basic" authentication scheme.

Note: This does not recursively protect any sub-directories.

The .htpasswd file contains lines delimited with a colon containing user
names and passwords hashed with crypt(3), for example:

heather:$1$pZWI4tH/$DzDPl63i6VvVRv2lJNV7k1
jeremy:A.xewbx2DpQ8I

On FreeBSD, the openssl-passwd(1) utility may be used to generate hashed
passwords.

While the FreeBSD port of bozohttpd has support for HTTP Basic Authoriza-
tion enabled by default, in the portable distribution it is excluded. Com-
pile bozohttpd with "-DDO_HTPASSWD" on the compiler command line to enable
this support. It may require linking with the crypt library, using
"-lcrypt".

BLACKLIST SUPPORT
On FreeBSD, bozohttpd supports blacklistd(8) by default. The support can
be disabled with the "-DNO_BLACKLIST_SUPPORT" compilation option.

Upon occurrence, bozohttpd reports two HTTP status codes to blacklistd(8)
as failures: 401 (``Unauthorized'') and 403 (``Forbidden'') . Of these,
401 is the one received upon authorization failure with the HTTP Basic Au-
thorization mechanism. A successful authorization decreases the counter
kept by blacklistd(8).

Note that the implementation of the HTTP Basic Authorization mechanism uses
a redirection; a status code 401 is always initially received. Therefore,
a single authorization failure of .htpasswd is reported as two failures to
blacklistd(8), but no failures are recorded upon successful authorization
due to the decrease of the failure counter.

SSL SUPPORT
bozohttpd has support for TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2 protocols that are included
by default. It requires linking with the crypto and ssl library, using
"-lcrypto -lssl". To disable SSL SUPPORT compile bozohttpd with
"-DNO_SSL_SUPPORT" on the compiler command line.

To have an enforced redirect, such as http to https, create a shadow direc-
tory root that contains a .bzabsredirect file that points to the real tar-
get.

COMPRESSION
bozohttpd supports a very basic form of compression. bozohttpd will serve
the requested file postpended with ".gz" if it exists, it is readable, the
client requested gzip compression, and the client did not make a ranged re-
quest.

FILES
bozohttpd looks for a couple of special files in directories that allow
certain features to be provided on a per-directory basis. The .htpasswd
file is used by HTTP basic authorization. If a .bzredirect symbolic link
is found, bozohttpd will perform a smart redirect to the target of this
symlink. The target is assumed to live on the same server. If target
starts with slash then absolute redirection is performed, otherwise it's
handled as relative. If a .bzabsredirect symbolic link is found, bozohttpd
will redirect to the absolute URL pointed to by this symlink. This is use-
ful to redirect to different servers. Two forms of redirection are sup-
ported - symbolic link without schema will use http:// as default i.e. link
to NetBSD.org will redirect to http://NetBSD.org/ Otherwise provided schema
will be used i.e. symbolic link to ftp://NetBSD.org/ will redirect to the
provided URL. If a .bzremap file is found at the root of a (virtual)
server, it is expected to contain rewrite mappings for URLs.

These remappings are performed internally in the server before authentica-
tion happens and can be used to hide implementation details, like the CGI
handler specific suffix for non cgi scripts in authorized directories.

The map file consists of lines two paths separated by a colon, where the
left side needs to exactly match a (sub) path of the request and will be
replaced by the right side.

The first match always wins.

A .bzremap file could look like this:

/nic/update:/auth-dir/updipv4.pl

The remap file should be short, access to it is slow and needs to happen on
each request. If a request path needs to include a colon (:) character, it
can be escaped with a backslash (\) The right hand side of the colon is al-
ways used verbatim, no escape sequences are interpreted.

EXAMPLES
To configure set of virtual hosts, one would use an inetd.conf(5) entry
like:

http stream tcp nowait:600 www /usr/local/bin/bozohttpd httpd -v /var/vroot /var/www

and inside /var/vroot create a directory (or a symlink to a directory) with
the same name as the virtual host, for each virtual host. Lookups for
these names are done in a case-insensitive manner, and may include the port
number part of the request, allowing for distinct virtual hosts on the same
name.

To use bozohttpd with PHP, one must use the -C option to specify a CGI han-
dler for a particular file type. Typically this will be like:

bozohttpd -C .php /usr/pkg/bin/php-cgi /var/www

Note that a plain script interpreter can not be used directly as a cgihan-
dler, as there are no command line options passed from bozohttpd to avoid
security issues.

If no CGI-aware wrapper exists, a simple shell script like the following
might do.

It would be invoked like:

bozohttpd -C .pl /www-scripts/bin/run.perl /var/www
and the script could look like:

#! /bin/sh

if [ -r "$SCRIPT_FILENAME" -a -x "$SCRIPT_FILENAME" ]; then
exec /usr/pkg/bin/perl "$SCRIPT_FILENAME"
fi

exit 1