I've been interested in lighttpd for a long time but haven't had the time to actually set it up until recently.

Why not Apache?

I'm still a big fan of Apache. It comes standard with pretty much every Linux distro you'd care to run and it's dead simple to get up and running with. I have no immediate plans to stop using Apache for Subversion & PHP.

So, why Lighttpd?

Here's the official party line.

Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility -- all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems.

My main reason boils down to Python. I've had nothing but horrible luck with Python and Apache (at least on CentOS/RHEL).

Django has never worked with Apache on my home server and Python web stuff via normal CGI/mod_python is dead slow.

Some of that slowness may come from the fact that my home Linux server is a 333mhz PIII with 256mb of RAM. I love that little beastie and I'm not planning on giving it up anytime soon. I'm hoping the switch to lighty will help me eek out a little more performance.

I'm also very interested in learning web.py and their recommended install is Lighttpd + FastCGI.

Getting a very basic Lighttpd setup running is pretty easy.

Download Lighty

You may be able to find packages depending on your distro. Otherwise you can download the latest version (currently 1.4.22) here and compile from source (which is what I ended up doing).

Unpack the archive

tar xzvf lighttpd-1.4.22.tar.gz

Note: Most of the next steps need to be run as root.

Compile and Install

cd lighttpd-1.4.22./configuremakemake install

Post-Install

There's a sample init script in lighttpd-1.4.22/docs/rc.lighttpd.redhat. Go ahead and put it in /etc/init.d and set it to run on boot.

cp lighttpd-1.4.22/docs/rc.lighttpd.redhat /etc/init.d/lighttpdchkconfig lighttpd on

For some reason, the install put the lighttpd binary in /usr/local/sbin while the init script expected the binary to be in /usr/sbin. I fixed it by symlinking but you could just as easily modify the init script.

ln -s /usr/local/sbin/lighttpd /usr/sbin/lighttpd

Configure

The next step is to create a config file and log file.

mkdir /etc/lighttpdtouch /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.confmkdir /var/log/lighttpdtouch /var/log/lighttpd/error.log

Put the following into the lighttpd.conf file

server.document-root = "/var/www/html/lighttpd"server.port = 80mimetype.assign = (  ".html" => "text/html",  ".txt" => "text/plain",  ".jpg" => "image/jpeg",  ".png" => "image/png")server.errorlog         = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"index-file.names        = ( "index.php", "index.html",                            "index.htm", "default.htm",                            "index.py" )

Fire it up

You may need to change the port if you're already running a webserver on port 80 but that should be enough to run with otherwise.

/etc/init.d/lighttpd start

Stay tuned for the next installation of this series where I attempt to get FastCGI working with Lighty and then move on to web.py.