Having one's own lighttpd and running it too

I’ve been trying to think about some flexible but solid ways of “virtual hosting” lighttpd, and considering it’s “lack of an htaccess” I want to provide people with access to the config. While talking to David today, he pointed out two things: -f and conditionals.

Apache’s httpd has-f where you can use it to specify an alternate ServerConfigFile, and it is used the same way in lighttpd. So I thought I try it out on Jamis Buck (with his permission).

First thing was to make some directories in /home/jamis/ and touch some log files

mkdir lighttpd
mkdir var
mkdir var/run
mkdir var/log
touch var/log/lighttpd.error.log
touch var/log/apache.log

And copied in the main lighttpd.conf

cp /usr/local/etc/lighttpd.conf /home/jamis/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Then as a quickie, let’s change some stuff:

server.document-root = "/usr/home/jamis/public_html/jamis"
server.errorlog = "/usr/home/jamis/var/log/lighttpd.error.log"
server.indexfiles = ( "blog.cgi" )
server.pid-file  = "/usr/home/jamis/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
accesslog.filename = "/usr/home/jamis/var/log/apache.log"
server.port = 8181
server.bind = "jamis.jamisbuck.org"
server.username = "jamis"
server.groupname = "jamis"

And what he has going there is ruby cgi so 

cgi.assign = ( ".rb"  => "/usr/local/bin/ruby",
                    ".cgi" => "/usr/local/bin/ruby" )

OK, let start her up

/usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /usr/home/jamis/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Oh my, that worked and let’s see what it’s memory usage is compared to TextDrive’s Manuals

txd
0.1 %MEM 
3.2MB
/usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /usr/local/etc/lighttpd.conf

	
jamis
0.1 %MEM 
2.7MB
/usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /usr/home/jamis/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf


	
www
1.1%
34.2MB
/usr/local/sbin/httpd

Not bad, 2.7MB for his process, and it’s at about 1/10th that of a single httpd child.

How many httpd’s we usually have running?

> ps ax | grep -c httpd
74
> ps ax | grep -c lighttpd
2

Oh.

That’s a difference, especially considering how they behave when they scale.

Let’s take a look at Jamis’s site under lighttpd.

> curl -I http://jamis.jamisbuck.org:8181/blog.cgi
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:37:44 GMT
Content-type: text/html
Last-modified: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:16:49 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.3.10

Not bad.

And in an environment with Apache, what if I proxy it through a light install of Apache?

Let start with a simple Proxy

ProxyPass /lighttpd1/ http://jamis.jamisbuck.org:8181/blog.cgi/

And we can take a look at this and then the headers show that it’s served by both:

> curl -I http://jamis.jamisbuck.org/lighttpd1/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:41:49 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.3.10
Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Last-modified: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:16:49 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Served-By: TextDrive's Textpache
Connection: close

Notice that all links though aren’t correct for it being served from lighttd.

Let’s see what happens when have both ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse

ProxyPass /lighttpd2/ http://jamis.jamisbuck.org:8181/blog.cgi/
ProxyPassReverse /lighttpd2/ http://jamis.jamisbuck.org:8181/blog.cgi/

The result is relatively similar but feels slower to me.

> curl -I http://jamis.jamisbuck.org/lighttpd2/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:44:44 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.3.10
Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Last-modified: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:16:49 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Served-By: TextDrive's Textpache
Connection: close

Again notice that there’s no love on the Category links. So how about we involve another fun module mod_proxy_html which should rewrite the html according to how we configure it

ProxyPass /lighttpd3/ http://jamis.jamisbuck.org:8181/blog.cgi/
ProxyPassReverse /lighttpd3/ http://jamis.jamisbuck.org:8181/blog.cgi/
ProxyHTMLURLMap http://jamis.jamisbuck.org:8181/blog.cgi/ /lighttpd3
<Location /lighttpd3/>
SetOutputFilter  proxy-html
ProxyHTMLURLMap  /blog.cgi      /lighttpd3
ProxyHTMLURLMap  /lighttpd3  /lighttpd3/
RequestHeader    unset  Accept-Encoding
</Location>

Ah ha! Now when I look at http://jamis.jamisbuck.org/lighttpd3/ I see that the category links have been rewritten so that http://jamis.jamisbuck.org/lighttpd3/computers and http://jamis.jamisbuck.org/lighttpd3/programming/languages works fine. There does seem to be some trailing slashes issues on some of the categories (hey, I told you this was a quickie).

And …

> curl -I http://jamis.jamisbuck.org/lighttpd3/programming/languages
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:52:33 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.3.10
Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Last-modified: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:16:49 GMT
Served-By: TextDrive's Textpache
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

So the next step is to play around with conditionals as an easy means for Jamis to “virtual host up” his stuff, with a config that would start with something like

$HTTP["host"] =~ "jamis\.jamisbuck\.org$" {
server.document-root = "/usr/home/jamis/public_html/jamis/"
server.indexfiles          = ( "blog.cgi")
}

And then also introduce conditionals that contain ruby-fcgi spawns.

And when it’s time to try out the proxying, have to remember to turn ProxyPreserveHost On because I imagine that it’s a good idea to pass the Host: line to a lighttpd that would be using it to virtual host.

·:· Posted 17 February 2005, 07:57 by Jason Hoffman to Lighttpd  |  

  1. This is awesome to watch come together. If not completely innovative.

    Good job Jason!

    Q: Is this a possibility for what you’re considering as a new Virtual Private Server environment?

    — Cameron    17 February 2005, 19:42    #
  2. No, anyone could do this right now if they wanted to. It’s no different than running Instiki on an unpriv’ed port. We’d just need to open it for you.

    — Jason Hoffman    19 February 2005, 06:54    #
  3. This is a test.

    — Dean Allen    23 February 2005, 08:04    #
  4. This weblog now runs on lighttpd.

    — Dean Allen    23 February 2005, 08:05    #
  5. With clean Txp 1.0 urls. No .htaccess required.

    — Dean Allen    23 February 2005, 08:14    #
  6. Hmmm…I’d be interested in trying this out. I’ve got one site just running txp and another that is running phpbb (hopefully will be switched to punbb soon), would that be a problem for lighttpd? What all would I need to do?

    — Scott Cropper    26 February 2005, 23:08    #