Lighttpd installation

2014-05-28T04:04:00Z.

Lighttpd is a light-weight web server, suitable for serving static content. This article assumes you are going to install and configure Lighttpd on Debian GNU/Linux.

Install Lighttpd

To install Lighttpd, execute the following as root:


aptitude install lighttpd

Configure Lighttpd

The configuration file of Lighttpd is located at /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. A simple configuration looks like the following:


server.modules = (
  "mod_access",
  "mod_compress"
)

server.document-root = "/var/www"
server.error-handler-404 = "/404.html"
server.upload-dirs = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" )
server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.username = "www-data"
server.groupname = "www-data"
server.port = 9090
server.tag = ""

index-file.names = ( "index.html" )
url.access-deny = ( "~", ".inc" )

compress.cache-dir = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype = ( "application/javascript", "text/css",
  "text/html", "text/plain" )

# HTTPS on port 9191.
$SERVER["socket"] == ":9191"{
  ssl.engine = "enable"
  ssl.pemfile  = "/etc/lighttpd/certificates/lighttpd-ssl-bundle.pem"
}

# default listening port for IPv6 falls back to the IPv4 port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl " + server.port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"

Explanation of some of the configuration options:

server.modules specifies the modules to be used.
server.document-root specifies the root directory of where HTML documents, CSS files, JavaScript files and/ or other static files are located at.
server.error-handler-404 specifies the URL to be called and returned as response in case of 404 (Not Found) error.
server.port specifies which port will Lighttpd listen on for incoming requests.
server.tag specifies the header value of Server to be included in response. Setting the value to empty string ("") effectively removes the header from response.
index-file.names specifies an array of file names which are considered as index file.
ssl.pemfile specifies the of a PEM file containing both private key and certificate. If the SSL certificate is CA-signed, you should also specify the ssl.ca-file option which the file contains chain of root and intermediate certificates.

References

Always refer to the official document for configuration syntax and options:

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Lighttpd installation

Install Lighttpd

Configure Lighttpd

References