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Book Review: Lighttpd by Andre Bogus

Updated: January 7, 2009January 2, 2009

Book Review: Lighttpd by Andre Bogus

Summary: This book makes an excellent guide to the inner workings and configuration options for the Lighttpd web server. I found the book very concise and practical. It's simply packed full of real-world examples any sysadmin will love.

Chapter 1: This chapter helps you get Lighttpd up and running on your system. I love how Debian appears first on the list of packages commands. It also includes lots of compiler options of you want to build your Lighttpd from source, and who doesn't, right?

Chapter 2: This chapter breaks out a simple server configuration then adds more stuff to it, explaining things along the way. I really like this approach to learning the configuration. Next it begins to cover all the many URL rewrite spells you might cast, and then finishes up with how to easily separate your configuration into include files and what-not.

Chapter 3: This chapter open with a possible virtual host setup using MySQL. I found this fairly interesting. Next it shows many different CGI options with special attention to FastCGI. The chapter finishes with an example of a simple mod_proxy setup.

Chapter 4: This chapter has some very interesting info for large downloads, large directories of downloads, and traffic shaping of it all. After that you see some very nice configuration options for dynamically securing download content against a database or memcache-d server. Last you get the full recipe for how to run your very own You Tube-like server.. nice!

Chapter 5: This chapter explains how to do custom logging and tracking of requests. It's a good reference mostly but the GeoIP location stuff seems useful I will admit.

Chapter 6: This chapter tells you everything you need to know about servicing SSL requests. Being your own CA is explained along with some easy examples for a safe and secure virtual host.

Chapter 7: This chapter explains many ways you might restrict access or provide authenticated access. Next you read examples for evading DoS attacks, logging, and graphing logs using RRDtool. Last are some debug options you can turn on in the event Lighttpd is acting badly.

Chapter 8: This chapter explains how and why you would want to run a chroot'd Lighttpd. Separating your web server from the operating system using local sockets is very simple it turns out. I always want as much security as I can get, don't you?

Chapter 9: This chapter sorts through many ways of squeezing additional performance out of Lighttpd. It shows some simple ways to profile and benchmark your server, and how to cache content only where required. Dynamic content is always better and separating things is simple to setup.

Chapter 10: This chapter explains how to take load off an existing Apache setup using Lighttpd as a proxy or gateway. It shows how Lighttpd can run in front of mod_php, mod_perl, mod_python, or even webdav. Seems Lighttpd can be an excellent load balancer in any mixed environment.

Chapter 11: This chapter is more about serving up dynamic CGI content using things like Ruby or PHP. It shows app-level configuration options for things like Ruby on Rails, PHPMyAdmin, and Trac. The chapter made me realize just how customizable a Lighttpd configuration can be.

Chapter 12: This chapter starts out with a simple Lua tutorial and then shows off some existing Lua libraries. I'm not gonna go into any detail here, either you program in Lua or you don't, and I don't.. sorry.

Chapter 13: The final chapter explains how you'd go about writing custom Lighttpd modules in C. I enjoyed this chapter the most. Writing Lighttpd modules is not exactly simple, but if you need a custom job done fast, this is the way to go.

Tags: php, lighttpd, rubyonrails

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