chneukirchen.org just switched from Apache
2.0.54 to Lighttpd
1.4.3 and all I can say so far is that it’s
been a pleasant experience—far less trouble than I imagined.
Moving away from Apache was a bit more complicated to me, as this site
was heavily configured using .htaccess—which Lighttpd doesn’t
support. However, it turned out to be easy enough to convert this
configuration into a monolithic lighttpd.conf.
One thing I tripped over was enabling CGIs. In theory (and as the documentation says), this should be enough:
cgi.assign = ( ".cgi" => "" )
It didn’t work for me, though. Asking in the very helpful and active
#lighttpd channel on Freenode helped me find
a solution. The extension should be explictly removed from the list
of files to publish:
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".cgi" )
That was the main problem I had while configuring (Well, except producing a segfault by triggering a rarely-displayed error message that had a wrong format string. But let’s see over that, they fixed it immediately.)
I think I’m going to use Lighttpd for other sites and local
development too, it’s just easy to use, small, and very fast. (Static
sites ship about 8 times faster than Apache2 when I did a quick ab
over it… 1300 requests per second on a loaded machine is really
neat.)
As a nice side effect of working on the site, I also replaced the front page of chneukirchen.org with a new design and dynamic content about the various things you can find here.
Enjoy.
NP: Aimee Mann—Beautiful