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.

Proxy

• When used as a proxy to Apache, if Apache issues a 301 redirect, lighttpd does not send it to the client right away. It waits until Apache closes the TCP connection. By default this takes 15 seconds so the redirect takes 15 seconds! A workaround is to lower the keep alive timeout of Apache (to 1 second for instance). This affects lighttpd versions until at least 1.4.28.