#   ___                   ____ ____  ____    _   _ _____ _____ ____  ____
#  / _ \ _ __   ___ _ __ | __ ) ___||  _ \  | | | |_   _|_   _|  _ \|  _ \
# | | | | '_ \ / _ \ '_ \|  _ \___ \| | | | | |_| | | |   | | | |_) | | | |
# | |_| | |_) |  __/ | | | |_) |__) | |_| | |  _  | | |   | | |  __/| |_| |
#  \___/| .__/ \___|_| |_|____/____/|____/  |_| |_| |_|   |_| |_|   |____/
#       |_|
#

OpenBSD’s HTTPD

What a pain in the ass.

Ok, I have been working with this web server implementation for some time now, and have not had a single reason to move to anything else. It is lightweight, secure, fast, and reasonably easy to configure. The most difficultly I have ever run into was due to not reading the man pages fully.

What I neglected to read about: The Directory directive

In Nginx, Apache, and Hiawatha(RIP) there is a directive to designate what the default file should be for the website. As everyone knows, this file is index.html. The reason for you to be able to configure this option is to allow you to service other primary hierarchical files, such as index.php, index.py, start.html, etc, etc… The directive for this usally goes in the first tier after you have designated the site name and/or site address, but not in OpenBSD’s httpd. In OpenBSD’s httpd, this directive get’s placed under the Directory directive leading one to mistakenly interpret it as a parameter to enable guests to view an index of the contents of the directory defined in the above directory directive. Which it does do, but also controls the ability for the server to serve any file named “index.html”. Which makes it really fucking confusing. Take a look at the example:

server "example.com" {
	alias www.example.com
	listen on egress tls port 443
	tls {
		certificate "/etc/ssl/example.com.fullchain.pem"
		key "/etc/ssl/private/example.com.key"
	}
	root "/htdocs/example"
	location "/.well-known/acme-challenge/*" {
		root "/acme"
		request strip 2
	}
	location match "^/$" {
	   	request rewrite "/index.html"
	   	directory no index
	}
	location match "^/(.+)$" {
	   	request rewrite "%1/index.html"
	   	directory no index
	}
	location match "^/(.+)[.](.+)$" {
		request no rewrite
		directory no index
	}
	location match "^/(.+)/(.+)[.](.+)$" {
		request no rewrite
		directory no index
	}
	location match "^/(.+)/(.+)$" {
		request rewrite "/%1/%2.html"
		directory no index
	}
	errdocs "/htdocs/errdocs"
	log { access "example-access.log", error "example-error.log" }
}

You see the directive for “directory”? Well, that’s it. Don’t do this.

Scenario 1

location "/*" {
    directory auto index
    }

In this scenario, a file, index.html, will be generated to display the contents of the directory.

Scenario 2

location "/*" {
    directory no index
    }

In this scenario, no file will be generated to display the contents of the directory AND no file named index.html will be served by HTTPD EITHER

Scenario 3

location "/*" {
    }

In this scenario, no file will be generated, BUT your index.html file will be served as it is supposed to.