| |
| ======== |
| lighttpd |
| ======== |
| |
| ------------- |
| a light httpd |
| ------------- |
| |
| :author: Jan Kneschke |
| :Date: $Date: 2004/11/03 22:25:54 $ |
| :Revision: $Revision: 1.8 $ |
| |
| :abstract: |
| lighttpd a secure, fast, compliant and very flexible web-server |
| which has been optimized for high-performance environments. It has a very |
| low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. |
| Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, |
| URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software |
| for every server that is suffering load problems. |
| |
| the naming |
| ---------- |
| |
| lighttpd is a __httpd__ which is |
| |
| - fast as __light__ning and |
| - __light__ when it comes to memory consumption and system requirements |
| |
| Features |
| -------- |
| |
| Network |
| ``````` |
| |
| - IPv4, IPv6 |
| |
| Protocols |
| ````````` |
| |
| - HTTP/1.0 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt) |
| - HTTP/1.1 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt) |
| - HTTPS (provided by openssl) |
| - CGI/1.1 (http://CGI-Spec.Golux.Com/) |
| - FastCGI (http://www.fastcgi.com/devkit/doc/fcgi-spec.html) |
| |
| Advanced Features |
| ````````````````` |
| |
| - load-balanced FastCGI |
| (one webserver distributes requests to multiple PHP-servers via FastCGI) |
| - custom error pages (for Response-Code 400-599) |
| - virtual hosts |
| - directory listings |
| - streaming CGI and FastCGI |
| - URL-Rewriting |
| - HTTP-Redirection |
| - output-compression with transparent caching |
| |
| FastCGI-Support |
| ``````````````` |
| |
| - parses the Response-header and completes the HTTP-header accordingly |
| - Keep-Alive handling based on Content-Length header |
| |
| PHP-Support |
| ``````````` |
| |
| - same speed as or faster than apache + mod_php4 |
| - handles various PHP bugs in the FastCGI SAPI |
| - includes a utility to spawn FastCGI processes (necessary for PHP 4.3.x) |
| |
| Security features |
| ````````````````` |
| |
| - chroot(), set UID, set GID |
| - protecting docroot |
| |
| HTTP/1.1 features |
| ````````````````` |
| |
| - Ranges (start-end, start-, -end, multiple ranges) |
| - HTTP/1.0 Keep-Alive + HTTP/1.1 persistent Connections |
| - methods: GET, HEAD, POST |
| - Last-Modified + If-Modified handling |
| - sends Content-Length if possible |
| - sends Transfer-Encoding: chunk, if Content-Length is not possible |
| - sends Content-Type |
| - on-the-fly output compression (deflate, gzip) |
| - authentication: basic and digest |
| (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2617.txt) |
| |
| HTTP/1.1 compliance |
| ``````````````````` |
| |
| - Sends 206 for Range Requests |
| - Sends 304 for If-Modified Requests |
| - Sends 400 for missing Host on HTTP/1.1 requests |
| - Sends 400 for broken Request-Line |
| - Sends 411 for missing Content-Length on POST requests |
| - Sends 416 for "out-of-range" on Range: Header |
| - Sends 501 for request-method != (GET|POST|HEAD) |
| - Sends 505 for protocol != HTTP/1.0 or HTTP/1.1 |
| - Sends Date: on every requests |
| |
| Intended Audience |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Ad-Server Front-Ends ("Banner-Schleuder") |
| - delivering small files rapidly |
| - php-servers under high load |
| (load-balancing the php-request over multiple PHP-servers) |
| |
| Works with |
| ---------- |
| |
| It has been tested to work with |
| |
| - IE 6.0 |
| - Mozilla 1.x |
| - Konqueror 3.1 |
| (for Keep-Alive/Persistent Connections, Accept-Encoding for PHP + gzip) |
| - wget |
| (for Resuming) |
| - acrobat plugin |
| (for multiple ranges) |
| |
| |
| Works on |
| -------- |
| |
| lighttpd has been verified to compile and work on |
| |
| - Linux |
| - FreeBSD |
| - NetBSD |
| - Solaris 8 + 9 |
| - SGI IRIX 6.5 |
| |
| missing for HTTP/1.1 compliance |
| ------------------------------- |
| - parsing chunked POST request |
| |
| ----------------- |
| Starting lighttpd |
| ----------------- |
| |
| As daemon in the background: :: |
| |
| $ lighttpd -f <configfile> |
| |
| or without detaching from the console: :: |
| |
| $ lighttpd -D -f <configfile> |
| |
| |
