How to Install Hiawatha Webserver on CentOS7 – Part 1

Hiawatha is an open source webserver with a focus on security.Hiawatha is an open source webserver with security, easy to use and lightweight as the three key features. Hiawatha supports among others (Fast)CGI, IPv6, URL rewriting and reverse proxy. It has security features no other webserver has, like blocking SQL injections, XSS and CSRF attacks and exploit attempts. The built-in monitoring tool makes it perfect for large scale deployments.
It is available  on many operating systems such as Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MacOS X. Because of the use of a platform-independent build system, it’s very likely that Hiawatha will compile and run on other Unix-clones as well.

In this tutorial we will look at how to install hiawatha on CentOS 7.The system parameters we will use in this tutorial are as follows:
Hostname – server.example.com
Operating system – CentOS Linux 7
IP Address – 192.168.234.160/24.

step 1 : Setup

Hiawatha web server is not available in the default repositories on CentOS 7,we therefore will install from the anku repository.To install the anku repository for Centos 7 ,run the following command:

rpm -ivh http://anku.ecualinux.com/7/x86_64/anku-release-8-1.noarch.rpm

After installing the repo,run

yum repolist

to update the repositories on the system.
Once the repo is updated,we should be able to search hiawatha webserver and install afterwards.

[root@server ~]# yum search hiawatha
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: mirrors.coreix.net
 * epel: mirror.onet.pl
 * extras: mirrors.coreix.net
 * updates: mirrors.coreix.net
============================ N/S matched: hiawatha =============================
hiawatha.x86_64 : Hiawatha, an advanced and secure webserver for Unix
hiawatha-extra.x86_64 : Extra tools for Hiawatha Web Server

We can go ahead and install hiawatha web server.

step 2 : Installtion

To install hiawtha,run the command:

yum install hiawatha

Once installation is done,we can run the following commands:
To start the server:

 systemctl start hiawatha

To enable server to persist reboot :

 systemctl enable hiawatha

To check the status of hiawatha :

 systemctl status hiawatha

We can confirm if system is running on port 80 and is being run by hiawatha by running

netstat -tulpn | grep 80

Output should be similar to the below:

[root@server ~]# netstat -tulpn | grep 80
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3134/hiawatha

Congratulation, server is running hiawatha Webserver.
The configuation files are located in the /etc/hiawatha directory and the default Document Root is /var/www/hiawatha
We can customize this to suit our needs and purpose.In the next part of this article we will look at how we can run php on hiawatha

step 3 : Testing

Open a web browser and type the URL in the format http://IP .In this tutorial our system is configured with IP – 192.168.234.160/24.Output should should be similar to the below.

References:
https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/
https://www.centos.org/
http://anku.ecualinux.com/