Tips : Drupal on lighttpd with clean urls made easy

Apache is and will be one of the best/popular webservers out there for years for most websites, but nowadays, when it comes to scalability, load, performance and speed, my first choice of webserver is lighttpd, also called lighty. It took me some months to create the perfect configuration for a Drupal site with a lot modules but I think I finally found it. My setup is used for Drupal 5.3 (and for the first time on a new site called CarChannel, cf http: // realize.be/carchannel), but will be more or less the same for the upcoming 6.x release in a few months. And even if you keep using apache, the rest of this article still is interesting to gain more speed for your Drupal setup with more caching tips!

Lighttpd and clean URL's - http://www.lighttpd.net/
I was very impressed with a previous project we launched at work using lighttpd instead of apache. The load on the machine constantly kept under 0.40 having more then 1 million hits per day. Time to check if Drupal would run also as smooth on this server. Lighttpd doesn't support mod_rewrite like Apache does, but after lots of googling, I finally found the solution which also enables clean urls and keeps everything running as it should. The answer is LUA and mod_magnet. No more exotic rewrite rules in your lighttpd.conf which always caused problems at some point. I'm not going to explain it here again for you, all credits go to other authors for creating this configuration. Read following pages to make your sites fly

• http://www.morphir.com/Lighttpd-Install-and-configuration-for-Drupal-with-clean-url: lighttpd with fast-cgi
• http://nordisch.org/2007/2/26/you-learn-something-new-every-day-today-lua-patterns. Note: change the prefix in drupal.lua to '' if your site is in the document root. The Drupal.lua file is also downloadable at the bottom.
• http://drupal.org/node/50243#comment-127659: only read the part about the 'url.access-deny' since lighttpd ignores the .htaccess file that comes with Drupal.

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Courtesy : Realize.be