Yaws is hosted at https://github.com/erlyaws/yaws.
Tested releases are downloadable from the Yaws download directory at https://github.com/erlyaws/yaws/releases.
To check out the latest release and build a number of prerequisites are required. (All code example below on Ubuntu)
NOTE: Erlang/OTP 18.0 or higher is required.
Installed erlang + development
# sudo apt-get build-dep erlang yaws
# sudo apt-get install erlang-nox erlang-src erlang-manpages erlang-mode erlang-dev libtool
Installed git
# sudo apt-get install git-core
To build the docs, all kinds of verious tools are required. latex, man2pdf ... etc.
To build win32 releases - the following is required.
Mingw.
# apt-get install mingw32 mingw32-binutils
Further instructions are found in the win32 directory in the source tree.
To check out the sources do
# git clone git://github.com/erlyaws/yaws.git
To build and to what is knows as a local install, e.g. a developer install do:
# cd yaws
# autoreconf -fi
# ./configure --prefix=/path/to/yaws
# make install
Alternatively, to make a standard install
# cd yaws
# autoreconf -fi
# ./configure --help
# ./configure --localstatedir=/var --sysconfdir=/etc
# make
# sudo make install
The above commands will checkout the HEAD source, build it and install it at 127.0.0.1:80 with the docroot set to the local documentation.
A local install does install yaws at http://127.0.0.1:8000
This is the typical mode of operation while either just trying out yaws, or hacking yaws. This will install a template configuration file yaws.conf in ${prefix}/etc/yaws (${prefix} is the value of the --prefix option passed during the execution of the configure script). If this file exists, the old file will not be overwritten.
To run a locally installed system, we run the installed yaws script ${prefix}/bin/yaws.
A standard install will install yaws in /usr/local. A configuration file /etc/yaws/yaws.conf will also be installed unless the file already exists. The default config file will set up the system to listen on http://127.0.0.1:80
Yaws can alternatively be built using rebar. Assuming you already
have rebar installed, simply type
$ rebar get-deps compile
This fetches all dependencies and builds Yaws.
The rebar_release page explains how to
use rebar to create an Erlang release for an application
that depends on Yaws.
The yaws executable is a shell script which invokes the erlang system and instructs it to start yaws. The command line flags for yaws are documented in man page for yaws(1)
When developing yaws code, the interactive mode is ideal. Typically, yaws is then started as:
# yaws -i
Run yaws as a daemon as
# yaws --daemon
All command line flags to yaws are described in the man page for yaws.
Web server configuration can be supplied to yaws in either of two ways depending on whether we run yaws as a standalone daemon or if we run yaws as an embedded application inside another Erlang program.
The yaws configuration is described in man page for yaws.conf (5)
It is possible to run yaws in embedded mode where yaws is part of a larger application. When running yaws in embedded mode, it is often not possible to let yaws read its configuration data from /etc/yaws/yaws.conf.
The function yaws_api:setconf(Gconf, Groups) can be used by an other erlang process to explicitly set a yaws configuration at runtime. To execute Yaws in embedded mode, it must be started with the environment {embedded, true}
The embedded mode is fully described at embed.yaws
