What web server to use for Lua web development

Question

What web server (and why) should I use for Lua web development?

Answer 1

What: Apache with mod_lua
Why : Because apache is a very good webserver

Answer 2

For development, it can be handy to run a small test server. A good candidate in particular for Lua web development is the Xavante server which is part of the Kepler project. Aside from some of the supporting Kepler modules , Xavante itself is written in pure Lua.

For production, the new mod_lua (which had been known as mod_wombat before the Apache team accepted it into the core set of modules) running on Apache would seem to be a well-respected choice.

Answer 3

There are a few Lua-based webservers around:

• Xavante seems to be the most popular.
• Haserl is nice and small.
• Nanoki is not strictly a webserver, but a nice small pure Lua wiki engine worth studying. As for the Lua wikies, there is also Sputnik, which is fully featured and very flexible, but is a bit on the slow side.
• There is mod_lua (ex mod_wombat) if you prefer Apache. Looks like it would make it into the next Apache distribution as a core module.
• Note that it is not so hard to write a FastCGI Lua module.
• There is also Luv Lua MVC web-framework project (GitHub page). It is not mature yet, but may contain some interesting insights.

Answer 4

there is as well the LuCI project [1]. which is the LuaConfigurationInterface, the web based mangement frontend for OpenWRT (embedded Linux).

The LuCI guys wrote also a very small webserver, called lucittpd. LuCI is an MVC as well. And in production state ;)

[1] http://luci.subsignal.org