Hiawatha was a free and open source cross-platform web server developed by Hugo Leisink.

History

Hiawatha development began in January 2002 as a web server. Leisink, a computer science student at the time, initially created it to support internet servers based in student houses in South Holland and the Netherlands, with security as its focus. The January 2009 edition of Linux Magazine included an article on the Hiawatha web server, describing it as "a light web server with good performance and some innovative security functions." In 2015 Hiawatha was cited as a lightweight alternative to Apache, as it prioritized the installation experience and reduced storage over adding other features. In February of 2019, Leisink announced the end of major development. Releases since then have focused on fixing bugs, and keeping components up to date.

Major version history

As of December 2023, Leisink has continued to publish bug fixes and small improvement releases.

Features

The Hiawatha web server featured: Hiawatha aimed to prevent SQL-injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), Cross-site request forgery (CSRF), and denial-of-service attacks. It allowed banning of potential hackers and had an option to limit the runtime of CGI applications. RFC3546 support was included with version 8.6, which was developed with PolarSSLv1.2.

Performance

In 2012, a performance test was carried out by an independent researcher (SaltwaterC). They found that Hiawatha was faster than ten other servers with Drupal static content, but performed comparably to the rest in other metrics. Hiawatha has supported load-balanced FastCGI and the PHP project's FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM).