CodeProject: Cassini and Apache 101. Free source code and programming help

Report Article

Discuss

Send to a friend

7 votes for this Article.

Popularity: 2.90 Rating: 3.43 out of 5

Introduction

Cassini is a web server written in C#, you'll find more information about it at http://www.asp.net/

These simple steps gets Apache up and running with ASP.NET

Download and install Apache 2.x for Windows (remember to stop IIS)

Modify the http.conf file:

# 
LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so 

# 
ProxyPass /aspnet http://127.0.0.1:8080/ 
ProxyPassReverse /aspnet http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Create a different catalog (not the /aspnet catalog in http.conf) for your ASP.NET files and start Cassini:
1. If you are using the cassini server included in WebMatrix
  c:\path-to-cassini\webserver.exe /port:8080 /path:"c:\path-to-asp.net-sourcefiles"
2. or, the stand-alone Cassini server
  c:\path-to-cassini\CassiniWebServer "c:\path-to-asp.net-sourcefiles" 8080

Test:

Cassini: http://localhost:8080/test.aspx
Apache: http://localhost/aspnet/test.aspx

<!-- test.aspx -->
<%@ Page Language="vb" %>
<html>
<body>
    <form runat="server">
        <asp:Calendar runat="server" />
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Ultimate test

If everything is working fine, you can move on to the 'ultimate' test, running ASP.NET Forums on Apache

Do a manual installation of ASP.NET Forums (skipping step 7)
See: http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=21470

Add to http.conf (assumes the modifications above are done)

#AspNetForums
ProxyPass /AspNetForums http://127.0.0.1:8081/AspNetForums 
ProxyPassReverse /AspNetForums http://127.0.0.1:8081/AspNetForums 
#aspnet_client
ProxyPass /aspnet_client http://127.0.0.1:8082/aspnet_client 
ProxyPassReverse /aspnet_client http://127.0.0.1:8082/aspnet_client

Start 2 different Cassinis listening on port 8081 and 8082.
c:\path-to-cassini\webserver.exe /port:8081 /path:"c:\path-to-asp.net-forums" /vpath:"/AspNetForums" c:\path-to-cassini\webserver.exe /port:8082 /path:"E:\Program Files\ASP.NET\Client Files" /vpath:"/aspnet_client"

It is not the fastest solution, but everything works fine. I decided to "stress-test" it using Homer running 10 threads 5 sockets per thread in one minute, and got the following:

Page	Hits	TTFB^* Avg.	TTLB^* Avg.
/AspNetForums/Default.aspx	286	1024.96	7458.23

*: TTFB = Time To First Byte, TTLP = Time To Last Byte

Bear in mind that this test was done on my Thinkpad T21 800Mhz/512 MB, which is filled with junk.

Now I am waiting for someone to write a mod_cassini

Reference

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here

About the Author

Per S

Occupation:	Web Developer
Location:	Norway

Other popular ASP.NET articles:

Multiple File Upload With Progress Bar Using Flash and ASP.NET
How to use Flash to upload multiple files in a medium-trust hosting environment
CAPTCHA Image
Using CAPTCHA images to prevent automated form submission.
Paging of Large Resultsets in ASP.NET
An article about optimization and performance testing of MS SQL Server 2000 stored procedures used for paging of large resultsets in ASP.NET
File Upload with ASP.NET
This article shows you how work with uploading of the files using ASP.NET and C#.
10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability Secrets
10 easy ways to make ASP.NET and AJAX websites faster, more scalable and support more traffic at lower cost