I had some time over the weekend to play a bit with Mochiweb.  It's a very nice little bit of work, but kind of strange for an open source project.  I think both things come from the fact that it was built to do some very specific things in a business, and once those goals were accomplished, that suited the owner just fine.  There is no nice/fancy project home page, no links to documentation, and in general, all of the stuff you're supposed to do for a successful open source project.   The code, however, is good, fast, and pretty easy to deal with.

Anyway, I wanted to use it for a thing or two I'm working on, so I created some .deb packaging for it.  It's been ages since I've done that (indeed, I officially retired from Debian), so it's probably missing something, but I thought I'd throw it out there for people to have a look.

The git repository is here: http://github.com/davidw/mochiweb – my changes live in the 'deb' branch.

The big thing I've tried to do is make it so that if you have several mochiweb projects on the same machine, they'll all be started/stopped by the init scripts, if you so choose.  What you do is add a file with the path to the application to the /etc/mochiweb/apps directory, and when you do /etc/init.d/mochiweb start, it will start all of those.  At stop time, it will run the stop.sh script, which shuts things down.  It runs things as the user that owns the start.sh script, unless it's root, in which case it simply doesn't run.

The thing that's missing right now is a way to get the thing to write logs somewhere, and I'm not quite sure how to do that, so here's hoping someone will write in with a suggestion.

The .deb file I generated ought to be attached to this post, although there are no guarantees that I'll keep it up to date.