Compiling YAWS on Ubuntu

Part 4 of the series, documenting the setup of an Erlang test platform. In this episode, it’s YAWS (discussed previously here) that we’re adding.

Another dependency first:

sudo apt-get install libpam0g-dev

Now we can get, build and install YAWS from SVN. Note that as before I’m grabbing a specific revision so I have a stable and repeatable setup:

svn -r 1129 co https://erlyaws.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/erlyaws/trunk/yaws
cd yaws
./configure
make
sudo make install

To use YAWS in embedded mode, you need to start up Erlang with something like the following:

erl -pa /usr/local/lib/yaws/ebin -yaws embedded true

Finally, here’s a very small test program that just serves static files from the ‘wwwtest’ subdirectory of the directory you run from. Before running this, you need an empty directory .yaws/yaws/yawstest off your home directory. To be honest I don’t know why yet as the parameter is newly added and (surprise surprise) undocumented, but the final part corresponds to the second parameter to make_default_gconf.

-module(yawstest).
-export([main/0]).
 
-include("/usr/local/lib/yaws/include/yaws.hrl").
 
main() ->
    application:start(yaws),
    GC = yaws_config:make_default_gconf(false,"yawstest"),
    SC = #sconf{port = 8001,
		servername = "ubuntu01",
		listen = {0,0,0,0},
		docroot = "wwwtest"},
    yaws_api:setconf(GC, [[SC]]).

Stick some documents in wwwroot, run the above and test away.