Welcome to the Aluminum Documentation.

What is Aluminum?

Aluminum is a lightweight, simple-to-install, and easy-to-use web server written entirely in Node.js, “an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime … designed to build scalable network applications.” It includes not only a traditional static/dynamic web server, but also various other features that simplify the web development process, such as authentication and network-based cryptography platforms.

Setup and General Knowledge

Note

In this documentation, / refers to the root directory of the Aluminum repository, except as otherwise noted.

To install Aluminum, simply clone the git repository, install the dependencies automatically with npm, and copy the default user files from the /defaults directory to /usr. Starting the server is as simple as typing npm start into your terminal.

See also

Please see the installation guide for more detailed instructions on installing Aluminum.

Aluminum is controlled by JSON configuration files. These files are found in the /usr/prefs directory.

Features

Aluminum offers several unique and useful features:

  • Highly Customizable: Use an official extension, a community-contributed one, or make your own.
  • Integrated Authentication Server: Verify end users’ identity without leaving the Aluminum platform.
  • PHP support: If you’re uncomfortable using Node.js for server-side scripting, Aluminum is also compatible with PHP.
  • And more: Remote system resource monitor, network based time synchronization, math rendering, simplified cryptography, etc.