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Lighttpd (Paperback)

~ Andre Bogus (Author)

4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In Detail

LightTPD is a secure, flexible, and most importantly, light web server designed and optimized for high performance environments. It is open-source and licensed under the revised BSD license. Its event-driven architecture optimized for a large number of parallel connections, its advanced features (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output Compression, URL Rewriting, and many more), and its small memory footprint compared to other web servers, make LightTPD the perfect server software for every web server that suffers load problems or for serving static media separately from dynamic content.

LightTPD supports the FastCGI, SCGI, and CGI interfaces to external programs, permitting web applications written in any programming language to be used with this server. Excellent performance for PHP, a particularly popular language, has received special attention. Additionally, LightTPD has become popular within the Ruby on Rails community.

What you will learn from this book?

The book teaches the reader to install, configure, and work with Lighttpd:

Working with Lighttpd 's web application interfaces
Configuring Lighttpd to use SSL
Preventing attacks and minimizing damage if attacked
Virtual hosting
Migration from Apache to Lighttpd
Setting up web applications and frameworks: Ruby on Rails, WordPress, MediaWiki, trac, AjaxTerm, and more
Understand and harness Lua/FastCGI
Writing custom modules/plugins for the Lighttpd API

Who this book is written for?

This book is for System Administrators or Web Developers seeking a lean deployment platform for web applications or who want to switch to a "lighter" web server than Apache.

About the Author

Andre Bogus

Andre Bogus is a musician turned programmer. He has worked in different jobs from voice acting to programming to teaching to managing software projects. At the moment he works as a consultant and implementer for KOGIT GmbH, an Identity Management company based in Germany.

He found Lighttpd while searching for the ideal software for his personal web server and quickly learned the tricks to make it do what he wanted. He enjoys learning new things and telling others about them. When his full schedule allows it, he can be found on the #lighttpd IRC channel.

Product Details

Paperback: 236 pages
Publisher: Packt Publishing (October 29, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1847192106
ISBN-13: 978-1847192103
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #603,209 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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	89% buy the item featured on this page: Lighttpd 4.5 out of 5 stars (4) $31.57
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	4% buy High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More 4.6 out of 5 stars (21) $31.49

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4.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Introduction to Lighttpd, January 31, 2009

By	Jason R. Leveille (Frederick, Maryland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

##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.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Lighttpd for the win!, January 2, 2009

By	Gregory C. Donald - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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 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 love 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 ways 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 really 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.

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4.0 out of 5 stars plausible alternative to Apache [and IIS], December 29, 2008

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME) (VINE VOICE)

Web servers have come a long way since the early 90s. Two dominate, Apache and Microsoft's IIS. But just like there are streamlined browsers (think Opera), so too is lighttpd a fast alternative to Apache and IIS. The claim by the book is that it is a minimal web server, optimised for raw performance in serving webpages.

A distinctive feature is the heavy use of regular expressions in the scripting language used to configure the server. Granted, regexp syntax can seem forbidding in its full glory. But the book starts up simply enough, and the chances are that your needs may initially be met with most simple regexp code.

The logging adheres to the Common Log Format. So any downstream analysis logging code that you might have written for other servers should be runnable on lighttpd logs.

One thing in common with Apache is the easy use of modules; letting you extend and customise the server.

For those readers inclined to plunge in and install lighttpd, the book also offers advice on migrating from Apache. (Alas, nothing for IIS, but that's lesser used than Apache anyway.)

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5.0 out of 5 stars This is the best book on Lighttpd
PacktPub never let's me down, and did they ever live up to their goal of packing books full with this one. Read more

Published 14 months ago by Adam Barrett

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