PHP Zend Framework on Yaws

Web developers looking for an efficient web server should definitely give a chance to Yaws, a lightweight and very fast open source web server developed in Erlang. For those who do some work in Erlang, this should be enough for a recommendation, since Erlang has been designed with high performance and scalability in mind. Those who haven't heard of Yaws and Erlang should have a look at this Yaws vs Apache comparison to get the idea.

Unfortunately, Yaws is not as mature as Apache in terms of available functionality. The one thing I missed particularly about it was the lack of easily definable rewrite rules, which would allow me to set up my favourite PHP framework (namely Zend Framework) to work under control of Yaws. Browsing through Yaws Wiki I found a post explaining how to use rewrite feature in Yaws. I used it as a starting point for my own rewriting module, which allowed me to run ZF on Yaws. I published it on Trapexit as a free code under no particular licence, beacuse - as I said - I didn't write it from scratch, but used a public domain work. Here's how it works (I assume you already have Erlang and Yaws installed in your system):

First you need to configure your MVC enviornment. I suggest following a manual at Akra’s DevNotes to create the basic directory structure. Suppose your Yaws document directory is /opt/yaws, you'll have to create folders /opt/yaws/application, /opt/yaws/library and /opt/yaws/public. Also create /opt/yaws/log folder for web server logs. Then create /opt/yaws/ebin and put there rewriter.erl. Compile the rewriter module from the command line with

erlc rewriter.erl

Create yaws configuration file yaws.conf and inform the web server to use php scripts and the rewrite module

php_exe_path = /usr/bin/php-cgi
ebin_dir = /opt/yaws/ebin
logdir = /opt/yaws/log

<server localhost>
    port = 8080
    listen = 0.0.0.0
    docroot = /opt/yaws/public
    allowed_scripts = yaws php
    arg_rewrite_mod = rewriter
</server>

Finally, run your web server

yaws --conf yaws.conf

and go to http://localhost:8080 to see if it works.

From now on, all client requests to localhost will be redirected through a bootstrap file /opt/yaws/public/index.php. Make sure all paths in your PHP scripts lead to correct locations.

Tested on Erlang R11B with yaws 1.68 on Linux Mint 4.0 32-bit and yaws 1.73 on Ubuntu Server 8.04 64-bit with Zend Framework 1.5.

Good luck!