Pancake is a lightweight and fast web server created by Yussuf Khalil, mainly written in C, PHP and Moody. The main goal of Pancake is achieving the best possible PHP script execution performance using its own PHP SAPI, however, you may use nearly any server-side scripting language using the FastCGI and AJP13 interfaces. Thanks to the non-blocking server architecture Pancake can also handle very high concurrency loads. Try it out!

• Linux >= 2.6.9
• PHP >= 5.4.0 (PHP >= 5.4.10 recommended, PHP 5.5 not supported yet)
• i686 or x86_64 processor or Raspberry Pi (no official support for other ARM architectures)
• OpenSSL >= 0.9.8 for HTTPS (optional)

Installing Pancake is quite easy. Simply download the current version and extract it anywhere on the target computer. Then add the executable flag to the Pancake/sys/pancake.sh file and run it. On most systems the following commands should do the job:

wget -O pancake.tar.gz http://pancakehttp.net/latest
tar -zxvf pancake.tar.gz
mv Pancake-* Pancake
cd Pancake/sys
chmod +x pancake.sh
sudo ./pancake.sh

As you can see, sudo is used to run pancake.sh as root user. In case you're already root or your system uses another command (for example su) please choose the appropriate command. Make sure you are allowed to write in the directory you want to install Pancake in.

You can simply overwrite your old Pancake. No configurations or vHosts will go lost. However, if there is an UPGRADING file in the root directory of the new Pancake, please make sure to read it first. It usually contains information about possible incompatibilities when upgrading.

Documentation and information about the configuration of Pancake can be found at the Pancake Wiki.

Pancake has an official init script for Debian GNU/Linux (and Debian-derived distributions like Ubuntu or Raspbian) bundled. The script is located in the main directory of Pancake. Run the following commands to use it:

cd <PancakeDirectory>
sudo cp init /etc/init.d/pancake
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/pancake
sudo update-rc.d pancake defaults enable

In case your Pancake is not installed in /usr/local/Pancake, please change the DAEMON line in the script to match your Pancake installation path.

You can then start your Pancake using

sudo /etc/init.d/pancake start

and stop it again using

sudo /etc/init.d/pancake stop

Pancake will also be automatically run when your computer starts up.

The script is bundled with kind permission of Jan Erik Petersen.

If you need help or have a question about Pancake, please feel free to write a mail to support@pancakehttp.net. I love to hear from you. :-)

If you love your tasty Pancake and my work, how about donating a few bucks via PayPal? :-)

All Pancake source files are subject to the GNU Lesser General Public License v3. See LICENSE and LICENSE.GPL for copies of GNU LGPL v3 and GNU GPL v3. In case you have any questions about the license, please contact support@pancakehttp.net.