The public SQLite and Fossil web sites are not purely served by Fossil for two reasons:

1. We want access to these sites to be secured with TLS, which we do via stunnel.

2. Parts of these web sites are static, stored as plain files on disk, not as Fossil artifacts. We serve such files using a separate web server called althttpd, written by the primary author of both SQLite and Fossil, D. Richard Hipp. althttpd is a lightweight HTTP-only web server. It handles the static HTTP hits on sqlite.org and fossil-scm.org, delegating HTTPS hits to stunnel and dynamic content hits to Fossil via CGI.

The largest single chunk of static content served directly by althttpd rather than via Fossil is the SQLite documentation, which is built from source files. We don’t want those output files stored in Fossil; we already keep that process’s input files in Fossil. Thus the choice to serve the output statically.

In addition to the server’s documentation page, there is a large, helpful header comment in the server’s single-file C implementation. Between that and the generic Serving via CGI docs, you should be able to figure out how to serve Fossil via althttpd.

Return to the top-level Fossil server article.