NAME

thrall - a simple PSGI/Plack HTTP server which uses threads

SYNOPSIS

$ thrall --workers=20 --max-reqs-per-child=100 app.psgi

$ thrall --port=80 --ipv6=1 app.psgi

$ thrall --port=443 --ssl=1 --ssl-key-file=file.key --ssl-cert-file=file.crt app.psgi

$ thrall --socket=/tmp/thrall.sock app.psgi

DESCRIPTION

Thrall is a standalone HTTP/1.1 server with keep-alive support. It uses threads instead pre-forking, so it works correctly on Windows. It is pure-Perl implementation which doesn't require any XS package.

Thrall was started as a fork of Starlet server. It has almost the same code as Starlet and it was adapted to use threads instead fork().

OPTIONS

In addition to the options supported by plackup, thrall accepts following options(s).

--max-workers

Number of worker threads. (default: 10)

--timeout

Seconds until timeout. (default: 300)

--keepalive-timeout

Timeout for persistent connections. (default: 2)

--max-keepalive-reqs

Max. number of requests allowed per single persistent connection. If set to one, persistent connections are disabled. (default: 1)

--max-reqs-per-child

Max. number of requests to be handled before a worker process exits. (default: 1000)

--min-reqs-per-child

If set, randomizes the number of requests handled by a single worker process between the value and that supplied by --max-reqs-per-chlid. (default: none)

--spawn-interval

If set, worker processes will not be spawned more than once than every given seconds. Also, when SIGHUP is being received, no more than one worker processes will be collected every given seconds. This feature is useful for doing a "slow-restart". (default: none)

--main-process-delay

The Thrall does not synchronize its processes and it requires a small delay in main process so it doesn't consume all CPU. (default: 0.1)

--ssl

Enables SSL support. The IO::Socket::SSL module is required. (default: 0)

--ssl-key-file

Specifies the path to SSL key file. (default: none)

--ssl-cert-file

Specifies the path to SSL certificate file. (default: none)

--ipv6

Enables IPv6 support. The IO::Socket::IP module is required. (default: 0)

--socket

Enables UNIX socket support. The IO::Socket::UNIX module is required. The socket file have to be not yet created. The first character @ or \0 in the socket file name means that abstract socket address will be created. (default: none)

--user

Changes the user id or user name that the server process should switch to after binding to the port. The pid file, error log or unix socket also are created before changing privileges. This options is usually used if main process is started with root privileges beacause binding to the low-numbered (<1024) port. (default: none)

--group

Changes the group ids or group names that the server should switch to after binding to the port. The ids or names can be separated with comma or space character. (default: none)

--umask

Changes file mode creation mask. The "umask" in perlfunc is an octal number representing disabled permissions bits for newly created files. It is usually 022 when group shouldn't have permission to write or 002 when group should have permission to write. (default: none)

--daemonize

Makes the process run in the background. It doesn't work (yet) in native Windows (MSWin32). (default: 0)

--pid

Specify the pid file path. Use it with -D|--daemonize option. (default: none)

--error-log

Specify the pathname of a file where the error log should be written. This enables you to still have access to the errors when using --daemonize. (default: none)

-q, --quiet

Suppress the message about starting a server.

SEE ALSO

Starlight, Starlet, Starman

LIMITATIONS

See "BUGS AND LIMITATIONS" in threads and "Thread-Safety of System Libraries" in perlthrtut to read about limitations for PSGI applications started with Thrall and check if you encountered a known problem.

Especially, PSGI applications should avoid: changing current working directory, catching signals, starting new processes. Environment variables might (Linux, Unix) or might not (Windows) be shared between threads.

Thrall is very slow on first request for each thread. It is because spawning new thread is slow in Perl itself. Thrall is very fast on another requests and generally is faster than any implementation which uses fork.

BUGS

There is a problem with Perl threads implementation which occurs on Windows. Some requests can fail with message:

failed to set socket to nonblocking mode:An operation was attempted on
something that is not a socket.

or

Bad file descriptor at (eval 24) line 4.

Cygwin version seems to be correct.

This problem was introduced in Perl 5.16 and fixed in Perl 5.19.5.

See https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=119003 and https://github.com/dex4er/Thrall/issues/5 for more information about this issue.

Reporting

If you find the bug or want to implement new features, please report it at https://github.com/dex4er/Starlight/issues

The code repository is available at http://github.com/dex4er/Starlight

AUTHORS

Piotr Roszatycki <dexter@cpan.org>

Based on Starlet by:

Kazuho Oku

miyagawa

kazeburo

Some code based on Plack:

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa

Some code based on Net::Server::Daemonize:

Jeremy Howard <j+daemonize@howard.fm>

Paul Seamons <paul@seamons.com>

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2013-2015 Piotr Roszatycki <dexter@cpan.org>.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as perl itself.

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/artistic.html