Tutorial : Installing Drupal 6.4 On A Lighttpd Web Server (Debian Etch)

This guide explains how you can install Drupal 6.4 on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch. Drupal comes with an .htaccess file with mod_rewrite rules (for Apache) that do not work on lighttpd. Without this .htaccess file it is not possible to have clean URLs in your Drupal installation. Fortunately there's a way to make lighttpd behave as if it could read the .htaccess file.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I have tested this on a Debian Etch server where lighttpd and PHP5 are already installed and working (e.g. like in this tutorial). I'll use the hostname www.example.com and lighttpd's default document root /var/www (where I will install Drupal) in this tutorial for demonstration purposes. Of course, you can use any other vhost as well, but you might have to adjust your lighttpd.conf.


2 Installing mod_magnet

I will use a file called drupal.lua that contains the rewrite rules needed by Drupal (e.g. for clean URLs). Lighttpd needs the module mod_magnet so that it can understand the drupal.lua file. Therefore we install mod_magnet...

apt-get install lighttpd-mod-magnet

... and enable it:

lighty-enable-mod magnet 

Read more..

Courtesy : Howtoforge.com