Yep, I would switch

OK, 48 hours later, lighttpd is still here and I’m afraid it’s here to stay. What I’m primarily excited about now is the Virtual Hosting in MySQL and I think that something like “htaccess” support (meaning user accessible settings/configurations) would be best done by putting it all in MySQL. No flat file in doc root but everything in MySQL. Htaccess only really exists so that people can change settings without having access to a main httpd.conf, but having it all in the database would provide the same level of flexibility as flat file htaccess/access to httpd.conf but then could take advantage of MySQL’s access controls.

So, a slight revision, what would take for me to switch 1000s of domains over from Apache to lighttpd?:

  • Something like htaccess support, full access to configurations in MySQL vhosts.
  • A flexible MySQL backend for authentication (flexible means that I can have it authenticate against our MySQL-backed mail servers or … whatever db we want).
  • Access logging into MySQL ala mod_log_sql2

That’s it, and with this our entire setup would be MySQLized

What about svn, dav etc? svn.ourdomains.com would remain a valid link and svn.ourdomains.com would go on their own server running Apache2.

Hmmm … let me find Jan’s email address …

·:· Posted 10 February 2005, 12:29 by Jason Hoffman to Lighttpd  |  

  1. That would be truly awesome! And user-friendly too since it could be manageable from a www UI

    — johan    10 February 2005, 13:27    #
  2. “Htaccess only really exists so that people can change settings without having access to a main httpd.conf” – not true, it’s also convenient if you have many sites on many servers and want to standartize your linux installation. For example, we at Inbox.lv have several web servers which do different jobs, but all of them have same installation with the same config files etc and only IP and hostname is different on each server. Websites can be then copied between servers without having to change base installation.

    — viktors    10 February 2005, 17:17    #
  3. “Websites can be then copied between servers without having to change base installation”.

    You can do that with the Include directive and it doesn’t kick your performance in the nuts like .htaccess does.

    — Dick Davies    10 February 2005, 17:24    #
  4. Our virtuals are already chopped out, wrapped and included, and could even be edited from a shell.

    Then the main config is entirely chopped up and the entire thing is as portable as it comes.

    Still have to restart for a change to happen, not the case with MySQL-based virtual hosting while still scaling fine.

    Parsing the config from a flat file for something like a control panel is in some ways more of a pain than yanking it out of MySQL.

    — Jason Hoffman    10 February 2005, 17:46    #