Lighttpd Web Server

lighttpd is a fast, small web server. It is supposedly lighter than Apache, however it has a lot of features like proxying, url rewriting, virtual hosts and so on.

Configuration

• To get PHP working (via cgi), you need this line in lighttpd.conf:

include "mod_fastcgi.conf"

• As mentionned in the mod_compress documentation, if you use a charset for a filetype (JavaScript), you should use the full mime-type with the charset included, else it won't act on this filetype. See this link.

URL Rewriting

• URL rewriting does not work inside an HTTP["url"] conditional block.
• You can use %1, %2 in a url rewriting directive. These correspond to the groups of your HTTP["host"] regular expression. They have nothing to do with the same variables for mod_evhost. Example:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "^(?!(images|css|static|www)\.)([^\s.]+)\.shoopz-local\.net$" {
        url.rewrite-once = ( "/sitemap\.xml" => "/%2-sitemap.xml", "^/(.*)$" => "/shop-engine/$1" )
        server.document-root = "/srv/" + domain + "/static/sitemaps/"

        $HTTP["url"] !~ "^/(.*?)-sitemap\.xml$" {
                proxy.server = ( "" =>
                ( (
                        "host" => "127.0.0.1",
                        "port" => 8080
                ) )
                )
        }
}

• You can also use %1, %2 in the evhost.path-pattern directive.

Bugs

• lighttpd-1.4.19 had a bug when no actual content was sent on a HTTP 410 return code (from a proxy). Fixed in 1.4.20.
• lighttpd-1.4.19 had a bug with URLs containing an url-encoded slash (%2F). It returned a 400 status code. Fixed in 1.4.20.