Installation via package managers (RHEL/Fedora)

Ferron 3 has official packages available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora, and derivatives. Below are the instructions on how to install Ferron 3 on RHEL or Fedora via a package manager.

Installation steps⁠#

1. Add Ferron’s repository⁠#

To add Ferron’s repository, run the following commands:

# Install packages required for adding a new repository
sudo yum install yum-utils

# Add a new RPM package repository
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.ferron.sh/ferron.repo

2. Install Ferron⁠#

To install Ferron 3, run the following command:

sudo yum install ferron3

Note

Keep Ferron up to date by running sudo yum update ferron3.

FIPS-certified cryptography variant⁠#

A FIPS-certified variant is available as the ferron3-fips package. Install it if you must run Ferron in a FIPS-compliant environment:

sudo yum install ferron3-fips

The ferron3-fips package conflicts with the standard ferron3 package, so you cannot install both at the same time. A FIPS build restricts cryptography to FIPS-approved algorithms: OCSP stapling, TLS cipher suites and key exchange groups are filtered, and HTTP basic auth password verification accepts only PBKDF2 hashes (Argon2 and scrypt are rejected).

3. Enable and start the service⁠#

To enable and start the Ferron service, run the following commands:

sudo systemctl enable ferron
sudo systemctl start ferron

4. Access the web server⁠#

By default, Ferron serves content from the /var/www/ferron directory. Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost to check whether the server runs and serves the default index.html file.

If you see a “Ferron is installed successfully!” message on the page, the web server installed successfully and runs.

Tip

If you cannot access the server from another machine, make sure your firewall allows incoming connections on port 80 (or whichever port you configured). If port 80 is already in use, change the listen port in /etc/ferron/ferron.conf and reload the service.

File structure⁠#

Ferron 3 installed via the package for RHEL/Fedora has the following file structure:

/usr/sbin/ferron - Ferron web server
/usr/sbin/ferron-fmt - Ferron configuration formatter
/usr/sbin/ferron-kdl2ferron - Ferron configuration conversion tool
/usr/sbin/ferron-passwd - Ferron user password generation tool
/usr/sbin/ferron-precompress - Ferron static files precompression tool
/usr/sbin/ferron-serve - Ferron zero-configuration static file serving
/var/log/ferron/access.log - Ferron access log in Combined Log Format
/var/log/ferron/error.log - Ferron error log
/var/www/ferron - Ferron’s web root
/etc/ferron/ferron.conf - Ferron configuration

Managing the Ferron service⁠#

Stopping the service⁠#

To stop the Ferron service, run:

sudo systemctl stop ferron

Restarting the service⁠#

To restart the service:

sudo systemctl restart ferron

Reloading the configuration⁠#

To reload the configuration without restarting the service:

sudo systemctl reload ferron