2019-09-19 lighttpd - serve static content - setup

I had to stop relying on friend to hold the content of my website. I wrote earlier a blog on how to setup a SFTP server. Let’s now see how to set up a http server with lighttpd. I usually avoid using python for this even though it is sometimes more simple because it is easier to detect python processes hanging on. On debian:

apt-get install lighttpd

The configuration is located here: /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. We let the firewall open port 80: sudo ufw allow 80. Let’s add a user for the server:

useradd -m httpuser
passwd httpuser
chmod +r -R /home/ftpuser/ftp/web
server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_alias",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
        "mod_accesslog",
)

server.document-root        = "/home/ftpuser/ftp/web"
server.upload-dirs          = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" )
server.errorlog             = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.pid-file             = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.username             = "www-data"
server.groupname            = "www-data"
server.port                 = 80
server.error-handler-404    = "/index404.html"
accesslog.filename          = "/var/log/lighttpd/access.log"

index-file.names            = ( "index.php", "index.html", "index.lighttpd.html" )
url.access-deny             = ( "~", ".inc" )
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )

compress.cache-dir          = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype           = ( "application/javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" )

# default listening port for IPv6 falls back to the IPv4 port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl " + server.port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"

Let’s activate the service:

systemctl start lighttpd.service

Last step, enable rotating logs. The file /etc/logrotate.d/lighttpd should look like this:

{
        daily
        missingok
        copytruncate
        rotate 365000
        compress
    delaycompress
        dateformat -%Y-%m-%d
        dateext
        notifempty
        sharedscripts
        postrotate
             if [ -x /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d ]; then \
                invoke-rc.d lighttpd reopen-logs > /dev/null 2>&1; \
             else \
                /etc/init.d/lighttpd reopen-logs > /dev/null 2>&1; \
             fi; \
        endscript
}

And restart the service.

systemctl restart lighttpd.service

The folder ls /var/log/lighttpd/ should contain the logs. And to enable https: Setting up a simple SSL configuration.