Surf is a small, experimental webserver written in Haskell.

Surf should not be considered safe.

In principle you should use authbind or privbind when setting Surf up on port 80. I could not get this to work.

Instead Surf drops priviledges via setuid. That is, it switches to the user specified in the configuration (conf.ini).

References http://stackoverflow.com/questions/394984/best-practice-to-run-linux-service-as-a-different-user http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9330367/how-to-configure-jenkins-to-run-on-port-80 http://kvz.io/blog/2009/12/15/run-nodejs-as-a-service-on-ubuntu-karmic/ http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3910

To bind to port 80 without using sudo use the package authbind $ touch /etc/authbind/byport/80 $ chown www:www /etc/authbind/byport/80 $ chmod u+x /etc/authbind/byport/80

$ sudo -u www authbind --deep runhaskell Surf.hs

To bind to port 80 without using sudo use the package privbind

$ sudo privbind -u 1000 -g 1000 runhaskell Surf.hs