Lighttpd
April 27, 2008
I’ve just wasted^Wspent a day trying to convert my web setup from Apache to Lighttpd. On the surface, Lighty looks like a very high performance web server, with a rather slick configuration format that looks quite enjoyable. I therefore spent a day or so getting up to speed on it, and converting my websites to use lighttpd. And I failed.
Basically, what I take from this experience is that when lighttpd advocates say that it is better for simple setups, boy are they not kidding. The thing that finally beat me is that I want to unify all my authentication over my domain in a single htpasswd file, and then use groups to control access to various sub-areas. Except that, while a group file is specified in the lighttpd documentations, the server meekly logs the error “group: not implemented…” whenever a require group=foo is present in the ACL.
If, like me, you were drawn in by the prospect of being able to have a more compact configuration, but have anything but the very simplest setup, you may want to save yourself a day or so and head straight for Apache’s mod_define and mod_macro instead.