boa: Run a server from anywhere

Usually I steer away from server daemons on this site; I don’t have enough experience setting them up and the configuration can be a little tricky.

boa was fairly straightforward though, even when I added the complication of yanking the Debian binary and jamming it down the craw of my Arch installation.

2015-04-10-lr-0xtbe-boa

No major accomplishment in the grand scheme of things, but I at least have a real screenshot to show off. :\

Everything I know about boa is off the Debian page or the help flags, with a little more added in the configuration file. If you point everything at the current directory when boa runs, it will serve up its own folder, much like you see above.

On the one hand, that might be preferable to some of the complexities for members of the high-end server market.

Apparently boa runs on an exceptionally small amount of resources, and can even do its business on Pentium-grade equipment. I don’t have a Pentium machine now that I can put that claim to the test, but perhaps the next one that comes along, I’ll try. (Actually I do have one now, but it’s so badly battered that I’m considering setting it free.)

That’s about all I can say about boa, but that’s mostly because I’m fairly ignorant about web servers to start with. If you’re in that racket and need something with a smaller profile, boa might be for you.

In Debian. Not in Arch. 😉