NAME

    starlight - Light and pure-Perl PSGI/Plack HTTP server with pre-forks

SYNOPSIS

        $ starlight --max-workers=20 --max-reqs-per-child=100 app.psgi
    
        $ starlight --port=80 --ipv6=1 app.psgi
    
        $ starlight --port=443 --ssl=1 --ssl-key-file=file.key
                    --ssl-cert-file=file.crt app.psgi
    
        $ starlight --socket=/tmp/starlight.sock app.psgi

DESCRIPTION

    Starlight is a standalone HTTP/1.1 server with keep-alive support. It
    uses pre-forking. It is a pure-Perl implementation that doesn't require
    any XS package.

    Starlight was started as a fork of Thrall server which is a fork of
    Starlet server. It has almost the same code as Thrall and Starlet and
    it was adapted to not use any other modules than Plack.

    Starlight is created for Unix-like systems but it should also work on
    Windows with some limitations.

SEE ALSO

    Starlight, Thrall, Starlet, Starman

LIMITATIONS

    Perl on Windows systems (MSWin32 and cygwin) emulates "fork" in
    perlfunc and "waitpid" in perlfunc functions and uses threads
    internally. See perlfork (MSWin32) and perlcygwin (cygwin) for details
    and limitations.

    It might be a better option to use on this system the server with
    explicit threads implementation, i.e. Thrall.

    For Cygwin the perl-libwin32 package is highly recommended, because of
    Win32::Process module which helps to terminate stalled worker
    processes.

BUGS

 Windows

    There is a problem with Perl threads implementation which occurs on
    Windows systems (MSWin32). Cygwin version seems to be correct.

    Some requests can fail with the 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.

    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.

    The server fails when a worker process calls "exit" in perlfunc
    function:

      Attempt to free unreferenced scalar: SV 0x293a76c, Perl interpreter:
      0x22dcc0c at lib/Plack/Handler/Starlight.pm line 140.

    It means that Harakiri mode can't work and the server has to be started
    with --max-reqs-per-child=inf option.

    See https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=40565 and
    https://github.com/dex4er/Starlight/issues/1 for more information about
    this issue.

 MacOS

    MacOS High Sierra and newer shows error:

      objc[12345]: +[__NSCFConstantString initialize] may have been in
      progress in another thread when fork() was called. objc[12345]:
      +[__NSCFConstantString initialize] may have been in progress in
      another thread when fork() was called. We cannot safely call it or
      ignore it in the fork() child process. Crashing instead. Set a
      breakpoint on objc_initializeAfterForkError to debug.

    This error is caused by an added security to restrict multithreading.

    To override the limitation, run export
    OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=YES before using this server.

 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 Thrall by:

    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) 2013-2016, 2020, 2023 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

