This field accepts a comma separated list of *Host names*, *IP addresses* or *IP ranges*. In the last two cases, both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are valid entries.
Besides the connection handler set for the rule, there are other parameters that can be set in order to customize the rule behavior. This menu offers the following tabs:
Rule: this is the rule type.
Handler: Specifies which handler should manage the requests that match the rule.
Encoding: to manage the compression of the contents to be sent.
Time: to manage the configuration of HTTP Cache headers used to identify cacheable content.
Security: in this section one can configure Access Restrictions and Authentication.
Traffic Shaping: Sets an outbound traffic limit for this rule, specified in bytes per second.
Several rule types are available to fit the needs of specific tasks. Sometimes you will want to restrict the content delivery based on a user’s country of origin, sometimes you might want a behavior to be applied to a web directory, or you might be interested in modeling how the web server behaves if a request matches an existing file (or not).
There is a complete list of the types in the Rule Types section.
The behavior can be specified further by combining several basic rule-types into a complex rule. Complex rules can be defined by combining several basic types with the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. For instance, we could define a rule that would apply to certain directories only if the request was made from a specific country. It would be as simple as defining a directory type rule AND a GeoIP type rule.
This allows to fine tune the behavior of any of the available handlers. Since so many options are available, refer to the complete list of handlers shipped with Cherokee.
Handlers are the modules that generate the information with which the server responds to a client’s request. By default Cherokee provides a number of them:
The content sent by Cherokee can be encoded or not. This tab is used to configure, on a per-rule basis, what encoders, if any, are to be applied.
You can set up the encoding method to use, and it shall be applied to whatever content is handled by the parent rule.
Whenever you set up a virtual server, creating a rule where gzip is enabled by default for the following file types: html, htm, txt, css and js is a good idea. You are encouraged to use this. Hardware is cheap. Bandwidth is not.
This tab specifies the connection timeout and content expiration settings.
HTTP/1.1 defines caching methods in HTTP. Cherokee-Admin can automatically adjust the Cache-Control and Expire headers depending on the values you have configured. The available options are:
Not set: Does not write the caching headers.
1970: Corresponds to the Unix Epoch.
2038: Maximum date value representable in POSIX time.
Custom Value: set a value by hand.
This section will give access to access restriction settings and authentication settings.
Here we can specify whether or not the requests that match this rule should be logged. This can be useful in order to tidy up our log files, since some rule matches might not provide any relevant logging information
Only https:: This configuration entry determines that the directory will be served by the secure server (https) only. If you access directory /admin -or any sub-directory- through a non-secure connection Cherokee will report a 426 Upgrade Required error.
Allow From:: This parameter lets you set up which IP or IP ranges will be allowed to access the directory contents . The remote client IP will be checked with all the provided list and only if the IP matches with some of the rules the access will be allowed.
This field accepts a comma separated list of *Host names*, *IP addresses* or *IP ranges*. In the last two cases, both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are valid entries.
Allow access only from the IPv6 localhost address
Allow from ::1
Allow access from the 127.0.0.0/8 network
Allow from 127.0.0.0/8
or it could also we written like
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0
It is also possible to use lists instead of a single IP or network range. And there is even the possibility of mixing IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and networks if you want
Allow from 192.168.0.0/16, ::1, 10.0.0.1, 3ffe:3200::/24
This parameter allows to configure user/password protected entries. A validator has to be used in each Auth entry in order to specify the validation mechanism. The following validators are available:
plain - Plain text file
Uses a plain flat file to perform HTTP authentication.
htpasswd - Htpasswd file
Uses an htpasswd file to perform HTTP authentication.
htdigest - Htdigest file
Uses an htdigest-generated file to perform HTTP authentication.
ldap - LDAP server
Uses an LDAP directory to perform HTTP authentication.
mysql - MySQL server
Uses a MySQL database to perform HTTP authentication.
PAM - PAM Authentication
Uses PAM to perform HTTP authentication.
Fixed list - Authentication lists
Uses lists of users and passwords to perform HTTP authentication.
It is important to take into consideration that there are two different authentication mechanisms:
Basic
Digest
Some validators can only handle one of those mechanisms because of technical limitations. In case the module supports both of them, the interface allows to choose whether one or both are to be used.
In order to limit the amount of traffic used for a specific rule you can set up a traffic shaper. By default no traffic shaping will occur, all possible network resources are used to facilitate the clients.
This parameter will not act globally, but per outgoing connection. Hence, 20 clients limited to 1kB/s will give 20kB/s as total outbound traffic. To limit the amount of traffic a value in Bytes per second should be entered.