Weblog

User launched fcgis with lighttpd

Jamis has a great quick article about the use of the socket config in lighttpd.

It’s been a year since I wrote Having one’s own lighttpd and running it too (used jamis’s site as an example) and a lot has changed with both lighttpd and rails since then. While we’ve stayed very much on top of things ourselves there needs to be a update in terms of best (or rather the best) practices and how things should (or have) to be done. And as Koz says, saying that no worries, railsbase will handle it isn’t good enough, so I’ll get everything together.

It’s been two years since we started using lighttpd in production, it’s use with rails started with this and even MT’s perl caught on nicely. Great little web server.

·:· Posted 12 February 2006, 21:37 by Jason Hoffman to Lighttpd | Got something to say? [3]

Putting lighttpd fcgi into a traffic context

Alistapart.com did about 5 million hits in two and half days and it did that on the default *4* dispatch.fcgi processes.

Four.

·:· Posted 27 August 2005, 00:09 by Jason Hoffman to Lighttpd | What!? [8]

Lighttpd 1.4 is out

jah$ curl -I http://weblog.textdrive.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 09:10:38 GMT
X-TextDrive: Pacific
Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 5
Server: lighttpd/1.4.0

And Jan says it

added nested conditionals
added remote-ip to $HTTP
added support for stat-cache via FAM
added a WebDAV module
fixed cleanup in mod_proxy and mod_fastcgi
fixed handling of filenames on case-insensitive filesystems

I also think that it now proxies SVN (?, at least that one of the proposed things for 1.4) which means that apache doing SVN can sit behind lighttpd now.

·:· Posted 21 August 2005, 09:25 by Jason Hoffman to Lighttpd | Comments [4]

Lighttpd HTTP Authentication with PHP-FastCGI works

Something I noticed quite a while ago is that HTTP authentication hooks in PHP actually work with Lighttpd’s FastCGI implementation.

One of the general “problems” with PHP-CGI (fast or not) is that the HTTP Authentication hooks in PHP are only available when it is running as an Apache module and is hence not available in the CGI version. This does cause a problem with some scripts (for example, password protected pages in Textpattern, and authentication of RSS Feeds and iCalendar with Alex Kings’s Tasks).

But fastCGI has always had

--pass-header header
The name of an HTTP Request Header to be passed in the
request environment. This option makes available the contents
of headers which are normally not available (e.g. Authorization)
to a CGI environment.

as a config switch. The problem though is that I’ve never seen it work with Apache2, mod_fastcgi and a PHP version since … 4.3.2 ( I think … something like that).

You can always tell when someone gets their FastCGI implementation right because HTTP Auth works.

Lightty’s implementation turns out to work great. Try the generic check (put whatever you want in as user and password, the fact that it even passes you through is the point) and Alex’s server_check.php (click on the Run Test button under #4).

Good job lightty. Good job.

·:· Posted 23 May 2005, 08:10 by Jason Hoffman to Lighttpd | Comment

RRD and MRTG see see see

This is what lighty’s RRD-output-thingy-moo-doohickey looks like.

This in contrast is the output from mod_watch 4.3 for Apache2 when combined with MRTG.