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Mijndert Stuij

A faster WordPress with Lighttpd

For the sake of this tutorial and my own comfort I’m going to assume you’re using some sort of Debian based Linux distribution.

First we’ll install Lighttpd and get PHP working.

$ apt-get install lighttpd php5-cgi lighttpd-mod-magnet

Configuration files for Lighttpd go into /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled. We need the following.

10-fastcgi.conf

server.modules   += ( "mod_fastcgi" )
 
fastcgi.server    = ( ".php" =>
        ((
                "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
                "socket" => "/tmp/php.socket",
                "max-procs" => 2,
                "idle-timeout" => 20,
                "bin-environment" => (
                        "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable",
                        "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "8",
                        "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000"
                ),
                "bin-copy-environment" => (
                        "PATH", "SHELL", "USER"
                ),
                "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable",
                "allow-x-send-file" => "enable"
        ))
)

10-magnet.conf

server.modules += ( "mod_magnet" )

your-vhost.conf

$HTTP["host"] =~ "^(www\.)?yourhost\.tld" {
  var.servername = "yourhost"
 
  # Set basedir for our domains
  var.basedir = "/var/www/"
 
  # Documentroot = basedir + servername
  server.document-root = basedir + servername
 
  # Attach the mod_magnet URL
  magnet.attract-physical-path-to = ( "/etc/lighttpd/wordpress.lua" )
}

lighttpd.conf

server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_expire",
        "mod_alias",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
#       "mod_rewrite",
)

server.document-root        = "/var/www"
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"
index-file.names            = ( "index.php", "index.html",
                                "index.htm", "default.htm",
                               " index.lighttpd.html" )
url.access-deny             = ( "~", ".inc" )
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )
dir-listing.encoding        = "utf-8"
server.dir-listing          = "enable"

$HTTP["url"] =~ "\.(png|js|jpg|gif|ico|css)$" {
        expire.url = ( "" => "access 40 days" )
}

$HTTP["url"] =~ "\.(html|htm)$" {
        expire.url = ( "" => "access 1 seconds" )
}

compress.cache-dir          = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype           = ( "application/x-javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" )
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"

MySQL and PHPMyAdmin

$ apt-get install mysql-server-5.1

$ mkdir /var/www/phpmyadmin
$ cd /var/www/phpmyadmin
$ svn co https://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/phpmyadmin/tags/STABLE/phpMyAdmin .

WordPress

Now you can download WordPress and create a database. You will also need to place wordpress.lua in the configured directory. The LUA file needs to look like this.

attr = lighty.stat(lighty.env["physical.path"])
if (not attr) then
  lighty.env["uri.path"] = "/index.php"
  lighty.env["physical.rel-path"] = lighty.env["uri.path"]
  lighty.env["physical.path"] = lighty.env["physical.doc-root"] .. lighty.env["physical.rel-path"]
end

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