Hey folks,

back in july, I posted about a new lighty branch we planned on creating. A complete rewrite with a new core design.
There haven’t been any posts since then about it and you might wonder if it lead to anything.

Well, roughly 4 months, 256 commits and 14 thousand lines of code later, we are at a point at which we have something to show you.
We just opened up our project in redmine to the public: redmine.lighttpd.net/wiki/lighttpd-sandbox

You can take a look around and browse the source.

We call it “sandbox” because there is one thing we want to really stress: it is not in a useable state yet. Boards as well as ticket/issue tracking have been disabled for it because we are not capable of providing any support at this point.
I repeat: NO SUPPORT FOR SANDBOX

So what state is it in exactly?

• the config handling is pretty complete
• basic connection handling including throttling and keep-alive/IO timeouts works
• error logging works (introducing multiple error log levels and targets)
• module/plugin interface mostly done
• completely multithreaded
• serves static files

I am currently working on the new mod_accesslog. It is already capable of what the 1.x version can but I wanted to expand it a little bit.
A feature that might be quite usefull: have different log formats and targets depending on the status code of the request. This way, you can for example log all request resulting in a 400 or 500 to a special file with addition information you would normally not log.
But I have trouble finding the right way to express that in the config in a good way. This is the perfect moment to get you users out there involved. I’d really like to hear your suggestions so please leave a comment with your ideas. Take a look at the config documention in the sandbox wiki to know what you can use.


A lot of work has been done and there is even more still ahead. It really takes a lot of time and hopefully it will pay off some day.


So much for the bleeding edge part. About 1.x:
There will probably be a 1.4.21 (pre)release soon. Watch out :)
We really would appretiate if more users would test our preleases and report back to us if they find any issues. It’s crucial in order to bring you well-tested and stable releases.

A thank you to all the people who did this in the past at this point!

This is it for today.

Thanks for using lighty.