Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

This benchmark shows how Apache2 (version 2.2.3) and lighttpd (version 1.4.13) perform compared to each other when delivering a static HTML file (about 50KB in size). This benchmark was created with the help of ab (Apache benchmark) on a VMware vm (Debian Etch); if you try this yourself, your numbers might differ (depending on your hardware), but the tendency should be the same.

This guide explains how you can install Joomla 1.5.6 on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch. Joomla comes with an .htaccess file with mod_rewrite rules (for Apache) (to enable search-engine friendly URLs) that do not work on lighttpd. Fortunately Joomla has a built-in method to make search-engine friendly URLs work on lighttpd as well.

This guide explains how you can install Drupal 6.4 on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch. Drupal comes with an .htaccess file with mod_rewrite rules (for Apache) that do not work on lighttpd. Without this .htaccess file it is not possible to have clean URLs in your Drupal installation. Fortunately there is a way to make lighttpd behave as if it could read the .htaccess file.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with lighttpd on a Mandriva 2008.1 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the lighttpd server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

This guide explains how you can create advanced virtual hosts on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch that are stored in a MySQL database. The method described here does not use the lighttpd mod_mysql_vhost module, and unlike mod_mysql_vhost (which allows you to store only the hostname and document root of a vhost in a database), this method allows to store individual configuration directives for each vhost in the MySQL database.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with lighttpd on a Debian Etch server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the lighttpd server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

This guide explains how you can use mod_mysql_vhost to create simple virtual hosts on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch. With mod_mysql_vhost, lighttpd can read the vhost configuration from a MySQL database. Currently, you can store the domain and the document root in the MySQL database which results in very simple virtual hosts. If you need more directives for your vhosts, you would have to configure them in the global section of lighttpd.conf, which means they would be valid for all vhosts. Therefore, mod_mysql_vhost is ideal if your vhosts differ only in the domain and document root.

Vlogger is a little tool with which you can write lighttpd logs broken down by virtual hosts and days. With vlogger, we need to put just one accesslog.filename directive into our global lighttpd configuration, and it will write access logs for each virtual host and day. Therefore, you do not have to split lighttpd's overall access log into access logs for each virtual host each day, and you do not have to configure lighttpd to write one access log per virtual host (which could make you run out of file descriptors very fast). At the end of this tutorial I will show you how to use webalizer to create statistics from the lighttpd access logs.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Mandriva 2008.0 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.