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!
6 Comments
Lighttpd and ImageCache
The only problem I have had with Drupal and Lighttpd is with the ImageChache module. http://drupal.org/project/imagecache
It was only for my blog so I never really found the time to look into the issue too much.
I'm a Lighty fan myself, but
I'm a Lighty fan myself, but not a fan of Packt. I picked up their "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development" and was rather disappointed with the quality of the book; not so much its content but the fact that it used poor font choices (Arial for titles and a difficult-to-read serif (Palatino?) for body text) and was printed using this odd "shiny" ink that was difficult to read in direct light - where things should be *easy* to read. For Pete's sake, guys, hire someone who knows a few basics of graphic design to put your books together!
Why LUA is necessary? Is
Why LUA is necessary? Is there no other options for clean urls?
Image Cache issues
The problem with Image Cache and Lighttpd stems from the LUA script required to make Clean URL's work with Drupal (I believe).
I'm not sure what the solution is... but I've not had the problem so maybe we're using different LUA solutions?
Lighttpd, Clean URL's...
With Apache, all requests which hit a file are serves directly (eg, CSS, images, etc). Anything that misses is passed onto Drupal via a Rewrite condition in the htaccess file.
Lighttpd does not read the
.htaccessfile and so does not apply this rewrite rule and therefore does not have Clean URL support out the box.There is, however, a handy LUA script available on the web which cases Lighttpd to pass any request which isn't an existing file onto Drupal.
Regarding Pakt publishing fonts
Interesting observation... I'll post another blog entry with my opinion on their font and ink choice when I get hold of their book.
It's an interesting observation, but if I personally buy a book I buy it for the content, not the font or ink choice ;-) hehe. I do appreciate it's a readability/usability factor though...
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