This command-line tool is the main Cherokee executable. It is used as a safety net to invoke cherokee-worker and to ensure it is always functioning. It also plays an important role in the zero-downtime mechanism implemented to allow graceful restarts of the server.
This is the full information provided by the manpage.
cherokee - Cherokee Web Server
cherokee [options]
cherokee is an extremely fast, flexible and embeddable web server.
This command will launch the Cherokee webserver. It accepts the following options:
Prints a brief help message and terminates execution
Prints Cherokee’s version and terminates execution
Perform a sanity check on the configuration file. The server will not run.
Launches the server as a background process (default behaviour is to stay attached to the controlling terminal).
Specifies an alternative path for the configuration file to use instead of the default cherokee.conf
TCP port number to which the server will listen.
Launches a server exposing statically the specified directory. When launched with -r, the configuration file is ignored, and the Cherokee instance runs with its default values.
Print server technical information.
Execute the worker process under Valgrind. Used only for development and troubleshooting purposes.
The following signals are supported by Cherokee:
Restarts the server gracefully
Restarts the server closing all the opened connections
Reopens the log files
Exits
Cherokee can be run either with this command or cherokee-worker. This last option is discouraged if you are not developing though. Note that, for most systems, a startup/shutdown script such as /etc/init.d/cherokee is provided and will probably be the most convenient invocation method.
