How to Install Hiawatha on Arch Linux

Hiawatha is a web server that is designed to be secure, easy to configure, and lightweight. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Hiawatha on Arch Linux.

Prerequisites

  • A running instance of Arch Linux.
  • A user account to execute administrative commands with sudo or root itself.

Step 1: Installing Hiawatha

Hiawatha can be installed on Arch Linux via the official repositories. To install it, run the following command.

sudo pacman -S hiawatha

This command will download and install the latest version of Hiawatha and all of its dependencies.

Step 2: Configuring Hiawatha

By default, the Hiawatha web server does not serve any content. To configure Hiawatha, you can modify the /etc/hiawatha/hiawatha.conf file. This configuration file comes with many examples that you can use as a starting point.

To start editing the configuration file, open it using your preferred text editor:

sudo nano /etc/hiawatha/hiawatha.conf

By default, the configuration file is well-documented, which makes it easy to understand and edit. After making your modifications, save and exit the configuration file.

To reload the configuration file, run the following command:

sudo hiawatha -c

If there are any syntax errors in the configuration file, this command will report them.

Step 3: Starting Hiawatha

Before you start Hiawatha, ensure that the web server is enabled to start at boot time:

sudo systemctl enable hiawatha.service

To start Hiawatha, you can run the following command:

sudo systemctl start hiawatha.service

To check whether Hiawatha is running, you can run the following command:

sudo systemctl status hiawatha.service

If everything is working correctly, the output should indicate that the Hiawatha service is running.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we showed you how to install Hiawatha on Arch Linux. By default, Hiawatha is a secure, easy-to-configure, and lightweight web server. If you followed this tutorial correctly, you should now have Hiawatha installed and configured to serve content on your Arch Linux system.