What web server to use for Lua web development

Question

What web server (and why) should I use for Lua web development?

Answer 1

There are a few Lua-based webservers around:

• Xavante seems to be the most popular.
• Haserl is nice and small.
• Nanoki is not strictly a webserver, but a nice small pure Lua wiki engine worth studying. As for the Lua wikies, there is also Sputnik, which is fully featured and very flexible, but is a bit on the slow side.
• There is mod_lua (ex mod_wombat) if you prefer Apache. Looks like it would make it into the next Apache distribution as a core module.
• Note that it is not so hard to write a FastCGI Lua module.
• There is also Luv Lua MVC web-framework project (GitHub page). It is not mature yet, but may contain some interesting insights.

Update. Some more frameworks to check out:

• Luvit: http://luvit.io/ (too node-like for my taste)
• ngx_lua module for nginx: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpLuaModule
• TIR for mongrel2: http://tir.mongrel2.org/
• Ophal: http://ophal.org (web platform)
• lev: https://github.com/connectFree/lev
• Turbo: https://github.com/kernelsauce/turbo