Jason Leveille's Blog

For quite a while now I have been deploying web applications to Apache and IIS web servers. My personal blog (this blog!) used to be served by the Apache Web Server, in a relatively low memory environment (256M … ok, maybe that isn’t low for some of you). At the start of January ‘09 I started having memory/server/swap issues. At around the same time I received Lighttpd in the mail from PACKT. With book in hand, in a few short hours I made the switch to Lighttpd and things have been running well ever since. If you’re interested in exploring what Lighttpd can do for you, I would recommend this book for your bookshelf. In case it is relevant, I was a complete and total Lighttpd newb prior to receiving this book … I still feel like a newb, but at least I now have a good reference in hand.

The Parts I Liked

The book covered a wide range of topics, including: a basic introduction to lighttpd, installation, security, encryption, optimization, virtual hosting (and topics in *CGI), among other things. Overall I really thought this book was solid, for a number of reasons:

• It contains a lot of relevant and rich code examples
• It provides a lot of detail with regards to whatever the topic is being addressed
• Each chapter wastes no time in addressing the topics you are likely to find most important (virtual hosts, security, streaming content, serving static media)
• There is little fluff in the book. In certain books I can take a sense of humor. In other books I just want the facts. This book provides the facts
• It provides a full chapter on SSL with good examples, etc
• It provides a full chapter on security, including the evasion of denial of service (DoS) attacks, setting up logrotate (which I was not familiar with), and grepping your log files. It becomes apparent rather quickly that the author really wants you to feel comfortable trying to administer and secure your web server
• It contains an entire chapter on optimizing Lighttpd, including load testing and caching
• It provides information on migrating from Apache, and hosting common web applications (Wordpress, PHPMyAdmin, etc) on Lighttpd. Let’s face it, most of us would be migrating from Apache, and very likely taking Wordpress (etc) along for the ride

The Parts I Struggled With

From the beginning of the book, the author discusses version 1.5.0 of Lighttpd. He also makes statements such as:

Chapter 12: As of Lighttpd 1.4.7, this module has been superseded by mod_magnet, …

The problem I have here is that if you look on the Lighttpd website, the most recent version of the web server is 1.4.20. I would rather have heard nothing at all about future versions of Lighttpd. I found it distracting, continually wondering if I should be using version 1.4.blah, or version 1.5. Only to find that I couldn’t find these mystery versions (maybe I didn’t look as hard as I should have). I also found I had some issues with some of the code examples. In some cases I had to revert to Googling to figure out the issue I was trying to solve (sorry, I can’t think of a good example of this at the moment).

Conclusion

Throughout my time investigating Lighttpd it has become apparent that this web server is not under heavy development. As a matter of fact, I came across many rumblings with regards to the projects stalled state. I’m not sure, but perhaps as the book was under development, 1.4.7 and 1.5.0 were very real. Perhaps post production those development branches died. I really don’t know. I do think if you are going to choose to run Lighttpd you have to keep these things in mind. Regardless, if you are going to run this web server this book would be a great companion as you are learning.