General
The general tab is for general options, that don't deserve a page on their own. Here you can configure the default page and manage plugins, you can open the WWW Server application folder and inspect and empty the file cache.
If a user requests a directory, WWW Server will look in that directory for the default page you enter here. In most cases, the First Start procedure will identify the right default page, which is probably something like index.htm or default.html.
All folders on the entire server need to have the same default page. Having multiple default pages is not yet supported.
In this field, you can specify what format the logfile should have. Fields that the server should fill in are indicated with a leading %, and most of these codes are the same as those of the LOGFILE setting of the Analog logfile analyser. The codes are as following:
| %s | Client IP address | %S | Client IP address (compatibility) |
| %r | Virtual file path | %q | Query string |
| %B | User-Agent | %f | Referrer |
| %v | Virtual host IP address | %d | Day of month |
| %m | Month of year (number) | %M | Month of year (three-letter English abbreviation) |
| %Y | Year (four digits) | %h | Hour of day |
| %n | Minute of hour | %b | Bytes sent |
| %c | Status code | %C | Status text (MacHTTP: OK or ERR!) |
| %% | Percent sign (%) | %t | Tab character |
If a field is not recognised it will be substituted by a question mark. That means you can copy any logfile format from the Analog help and use it - you only need to replace \t with %t and \\ with \.
The plugin manager is used, well, to manage plugins. The most likely thing you want to do is letting some kind of plugin serve more kinds of files. For example, you might want to use the default plugin to serve .zip and .exe files too. In that case, select the plugin and click "File types". In the form that appears, you can edit, add and remove file types as you like. When you are finished, click "Save" and the settings will be applied.
Do not forget the leading dot with the file extensions, but do not add an asterisk or other wildcards.
If you want to use the Server-Side Includes-plugin, do not forget to add the .shtm and .shtml extensions to the default plugin. Otherwise no single plugin can read these files from disk, so instead of processing them for SSI the server will just return a 500 Internal Server Error.
You can also want to change other options of certain plugins. To do that, select it and click "Configure plugin". When you are done with configuring the plugin, you need to click "Reload" to apply the changes.
WWW Server supports file caching. At startup, it will look how much physical memory is available. It then tries to never use more memory than that.
The cache is used for two things: sending files to clients and caching. If a file is cachable in the sense that it will not likely change, "reuse" will appear after it. Otherwise, this will not appear and when the file is requested twice, it will appear twice. The number after the file is how many clients are currently retrieving it.
When you choose to empty the cache, all files that are not currently being served (the number behind it is zero) are removed from the cache. This option is useful if you modified a cached file.
If you modified a file and your webbrowser does not reflect the changes, make sure that nobody accesses the file and then empty the cache.
If you write dynamic pages (for example, using PHP or Perl), make sure that these scripts set the appropriate headers, for example "Pragma: no-cache". Otherwise they will get cached unintentionally. Note that with other webservers that do not cache, users can still get problems because of the webbrowser or proxy caching the file, if you don't set the appropriate headers.
If possible, WWW Server (Raai and above) ommits the cache for very large files, so that you can also serve ISO images and things like that. This works for plain sending of files only. If you do fancy things like SSI or PHP, the entire file is still cached, so it is not recommended to serve very large files with them.