Ask HN: Does anyone here use OS X as a webserver?
We have webservers running BSD, Linux, Windows, but when it comes to OSX, I have only seen people installing server software on it because they do development on it. Does anyone here run/administrate a big website (say with a million users) on OSX? Why did you (or your company) choose OSX? Can you compare it to hosting on other platforms? I doubt you will fine anyone who does this today for reasons other than a needing to support legacy software that only runs on OS X for some reason. All modern web application stacks run as well on Linux as they would on OS X, if not better, so there is no advantage to running OS X and lots of downsides. You need to run OS X on Apple hardware, and they haven't made a blade server for several years, so you'd be stuck with either the mini or the Mac Pro, either of which is going to be expensive for the computing resources you get. You also can't fit them neatly into an enclosure. Also, if you ever wanted to move your infrastructure to the cloud you'd need to move to Linux anyway. I can think of no valid reason to use OS X server to host any kind of web app. > Also, if you ever wanted to move your infrastructure to the cloud you'd need to move to Linux anyway. Not true, there are several Mac based hosting companies, offering a mix of physical and virtual servers. Please name one cloud hosting provider who offers Mac OS X. There are plenty more choices, those were just the first few I found. This is just hosting. Nothing says stuck with a Mac mini like "Mac Mini" Vault :P Before the last refresh, they could actually be quite powerful little servers with the i7 option. I think a lot of people over-estimate the resources they will require (and either end up paying huge amounts for an over-provisioned service, OR end up locking themselves into an 'infinitely scalable' cloud provider that they never end up scaling. There is an image CDN (EDIT: imgix, as tristanj linked below) which runs OS X for their image processing servers and I've seen pictures of rack holders for Mac Minis for build servers, but in general OS X isn't a very interesting choice. Running it on non-Apple hardware is legally questionable at best (the EULA forbids it, if this part of the EULA is applicable in your country is a question for a lawyer), Apple doesn't do server hardware anymore, it costs money and you don't get support or special software from Apple for server-usage for it, and since nearly nobody runs it as a server OS it probably isn't very high on the priority list to support that usage for other software vendors or open-source project. A lot of things probably will work well since they are made to run for developer usage, but if you do not absolutely need integration with something apple-specific or just want to reuse an old mac lying around for a hobby project it doesn't give you anything over other OSes as a normal web server. You're correct in that Apple doesn't manufacture server hardware like the Xserve anymore, but OS X, Server edition is still available and it will manage Apache for you (albeit in a terrible way, I don't like the excessive configuration they apply) Many of Apple's own web sites run Apple hardware for outward facing, large scale serving (I used to work there). At the end of the day, Unix is Unix. I run nginx on OS X on a number of Mac Minis without issue and long uptimes. >Many of Apple's own web sites run Apple hardware for outward facing, large scale serving (I used to work there). Does that mean Mac Mini? Or Custom Hardware like Xserve. Oh, back then it was a wall full of XServes. These days, if they run Macs, they're probably racking Mac Pros. Not me personally, but Imgix uses Mac Pros in their datacenter for graphics related work. http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros And not directly what you asked, but a thread that comes to mind is this one, where an unnamed company (presumably Mathworks) built a rack of Macbook Pros for testing purposes. Serving HTTP requests has been commoditised, there is a hundred cheaper, better, ways to serve a webpage.
The only sensible case is non-mission critical SOHO scenario where you happen to have a mac mini or iMac idling around and gathering dust otherwise. A few of the continuous integration companies that support iOS/Mac development run fleets of Macs. If you need info, talk to the folks at bitrise.io or CircleCI I would think the main barrier to doing this is the tie-in between the hardware and software. Mac hardware doesn't even really have a "large server" piece. And certainly if they did it wouldn't be very cheap compared to a Linux box. Since basically any software you would run on OSX to run a server you would presumably be able to run on Linux as well (e.g. nginx, etc.), I don't know what the advantage would be. I ran part of a website on OS X. We needed to generate screen captures of URLs back before lots of tools existed to solve that problem, so we had a Mac Mini generating captures and thumbnails. For a very long time they were all generated, stored locally, and served by Apache. Recently (after I stopped working on the project) serving was migrated to S3, I believe just due to disk space issues. An entire colocation facility that runs Mac minis. It looks fun. The only reason why I would personally do that is to run some continuous integration for OSX software. Otherwise I can't think of any reason why one would run a OSX server,which implies owning a Macintosh. Some legacy frameworks like web objects might run better on OSX. At a previous job, we used a server on a mac mini that ran a proprietary software which did 3GP video encoding with DRM. We had to buy a mac mini for that single purpose (+ the cost of the software license). > run some continuous integration for OSX software I can confirm this (I work at MacStadium). We've got 1. a large number of CI SaaS companies that run their OS X/iOS builds on our hardware and 2. at least several hundred companies that run their own custom build tools or Jenkins on individual or clusters of Mac minis, Xserves, and Mac Pros in our data centers. If you use it, don't install their Server.app unless you specifically need something it does. It takes over port 443 and others forcing you to do things in their way behind their global proxy. We do, but not at the millions of users level. We use it to run a swift proxy server. We have no interest in scaling on OSX and plan to port to linux. It's an interim type of thing. Ten years ago when Xserves were a thing we ran web servers on OS X, but primarily because we needed OS X for some other server software and it was cheaper to also run a web server on those boxes than stand up a Linux box. We've since abandoned this practice as there is no Apple hardware suitable for it. We still run some Mac mini servers for things that do not run on any other OS, but definitely not web sites/apps. I did serve a company internal tool written in PHP/mysql from a white macbook. It was served to all our retail locations (under 100 DAUs).
It was a "but it works on my machine" - "back up your email, your machine is going into production" situation. It ended up taking almost two years to migrate the application away because it just worked.
Picture of said server macbook https://flic.kr/p/DY4k1U Edit: Offtopic but interesting. I definitely don't have millions of users, but there are hosting companies that do mac only. You can ask them if they have large clients. (My needs are a node.js based site on virtualmacosx. I had written something locally on Mac, and it depended on things that OSX did different than Linux, and decided I didn't have the time or inclination to fix it, so went with VMOSX.) Hosting company that does Mac only[0] here (I work at MacStadium[1]). We've got customers of all sizes. It started out with just individual developers and small teams using our solutions so they didn't have to spend capital and IT resources on their own Mac hardware. Many are still here with Mac minis rented or colocated. Now though, we've got fortune 500 customers, many enterprise tech companies, and a growing number of unicorns joining the service since they can't do internally what we can do at scale in data centers with the Mac Pro. A lot of these customers are using us to test iOS apps with large clusters of dedicated Mac Pros connected to SAN. [0]: We mostly serve customers that need Mac hardware for app development and CI/CD. We also have HP bladeservers, though, as a few companies have moved their entire infrastructure to our data centers or have migrated from Mac hardware to generic Linux systems and don't want to leave due to certain features we can offer. The only webservice I've run on OSX was a Jenkins webserver to provide an HTTP dashboard for an automated ios app build system running on the same machine. And it was not a pleasant experience at all. I do not recommend using OSX as a webserver unless you absolutely have to (for example to run Xcode builds). I have some OS X machines on the LAN for things like dashboards but I wouldn't dream of using one on production web servers. I really like OS X, I've been using it on my personal and work computers for 9 years. But for server sit is Linux all the way. IIRC, a few years back http://iolanguage.org/ was hosted on an aging Macbook. I'm not sure if that's still the case. RunSwiftLang.com's Swift interpreter component runs on OS X to make use of the native Foundation libraries. Not a huge app (Ruby/Sinatra) in of itself but fits the bill. I've used Filemaker Server to host it's web interface. I probably wouldn't use it again, but I didn't know of any simple self-hosted alternatives at the time. I've spun up OSX Server instances to run 4D databases in the past, nothing in production with the sort of users you're looking at however. I suspect interest in this withered greatly after Apple abandoned Xserve used to have a few Xserves when they were a thing, never a million users though.