The Built-In Web Server

and things you need to know if you don't want to use it, for Be in your Stereo.

The built-in web server always serves files from the location /boot/home/config/settings/biys/current_skin/. That file is actually a symlink that is adjusted to point to your preferred skin when you use the skin-selector in the plugin's preferences.

It is strongly recommended that if you set up a web server like Apache or Robin Hood, that you tell it to use /boot/home/config/settings/biys/current_skin/ for its document root. This way, the preference dialog's skin selector will continue to work.

Details on the built-in web server's capabilities

To keep things simple, BIYS ships with a basic web server built in. It has one parameter:
  1. What port to listen to
It has none of the features you would expect from a real web server, such as authentication, database connectivity, configurable logging, or multiple hosts.

The web server knows that some types of files are static (i.e. unchanging). Static files are sent straight to the web browser unchanged. The server code decides based on file extension - not BeOS attributes - whether a file is static. The filenames that are recognized as static are

extensionMIME type
gifimage/gif
jpegimage/jpeg
jpgimage/jpeg
pngimage/png
htmltext/html
txttext/plain
Everything else is sent to PHP for processing. PHP is expected to be in your path, and have the command name "php".
next: PHP API for skin authors or skip to the closing notes if you don't want to write your own skin.