Web Server

Web Server

The term web server has three meanings:

• A computer that provides services.
• A computer responsible for providing web pages, primarily HTML files, transmitted to clients (generally referring to web browsers) via the HTTP protocol.
• A server program that provides web pages.

Each web server (the second meaning) will run at least one web server program (the third meaning).

Currently, the most common web (HTTP) servers on the market are:

• Apache HTTP Server from the Apache Software Foundation
• Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
• Google Web Server
• nginx from nginx, Inc.
• lighttpd from lighttpd

In mainland China, it is referred to as: Web Server

General Functions

While each web server program may differ significantly, they all share some common features. Each web server program accepts HTTP requests from the internet and then provides HTTP responses to the requester. HTTP responses typically contain an HTML file but can also include a plain text file, an image, or other types of files.

Generally, these files are stored in the local file system of the web server, and both the URL and local filenames have a hierarchical organizational structure. The server simply maps the URL to the local file system. When the web server software is correctly installed and configured, the server administrator will specify a local path known as the root directory for the location where the server software places files.

For example, if we set up server software on example.funnycorp.com, we can set the root directory of the server software to /home/public/web/. When a visitor enters the URL http://example.funnycorp.com/lips/raspberry.html, the server software on example.funnycorp.com will read the file /home/public/web/lips/raspberry.html.

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