Hi,
I'm doing PHP development. And coming from a Rails background, I'm looking for a like-for-like replacement for Webrick in PHP. Is there such a light weight server? Something with minimal configuration and installation effort. Apache is actually fine. But I would like to know if there're other options. Or do most of you use Apache?
Most here will use apache but there are other options. IBM posted a nice long article on the subject. Not all of them will support PHP.
Of these alternatives, lighttpd is probably the most popular.
Back when Lighty was having many reports of memory leaks, someone mentioned Nginx. Ignore the ridiculous name, it's actually the best HTTPd I've ever used (and I've been using Apache since 1.1). Install PHP as FCGI rather than a module and you're golden.
You could try cherokee. It doesn't come configured with PHP out of the box, but it's easy to set up and very fast,
Regarding do most use Apache, the answer is yes. Most servers on the web are using Apache (mostly LAMP). PRobabyly the biggest reason is because Apache is very flexible works with just about anything. It has a lot of plugins and is very configurable. It is also very fast and runs on just about anything.
Almost everyone runs PHP in Apache, hardly anyone runs it with anything else. The risk of using something else is far outweighed by the benefit of using a standard application server platform.
If you did use some other web server, will PHP will continue to support it in future releases? (this is of course a problem for Apache as well, but more likely).
In what way is Apache not "Light enough" for you?