Thingy Ma Jig is the blog of Nicholas Thompson and contains any useful tips, sites and general blog-stuff which are considered interesting or handy!
Posted on 30 December 2008 in
technology
lighttpd
geek
Drupal
As many readers might know, I use Lighttpd a lot. I really like it for many reasons. Its fast, free, easy to configure, very light-weight (handy if you're running a cheap VPS or a low end server)… This is very apt for me because almost EVERY website I make now is a Drupal site (why would you use anything else?!).
Drupal is, inherently, a rather large web app - mainly because of its ability to do nigh-on anything. This means one needs to be a little careful about what you do with your resources. From my experience, Apache (which is bloody brilliant) can tend to get a little "bloated". I know there are ways of slimming it down and improving it, but I also like playing with new toys too! This is when I moved over to Lighttpd…
When I installed Lighttpd, the only resources I could easily find were via Googling. This is fine (and free) but is quite sparse in nature; one blog tells you how to configure and install Lighttpd and another will tell you how to setup LUA to work with Drupal.
Now those great guys at Packt Publishing have produced a book about Lighttpd. This 223 page reference and tutorial will guide you through topics such as Installing Lighttpd and Migration From Apache through to more advanced stuff like configuring it for use with common web apps like Wordpress & MediaWiki and securing it using technologies like SSL. There are also sections on using LUA (which is necessary for Drupal folks who want clean URL's) and writing custom addons for the Lighttpd API (something I've not personally wanted or needed to do… yet, but handy to know its there!)
This is definately a book I'm going to look into buying… and I, generally speaking, don't "do" books!