lighty's life

lighty developer blog

Mission Failed: You Got Spotted

Last month have been very impressive for lighty. Every month I was waiting for the statistics gathered by NetCraft about the usage from web-server software on the net. We all know that Apache has 70% of the market, but as every month I check the detailed reports too see where lighty is now: place 30, 19000 installations.

And somehow this information got leaked to our last few missing distributor as I got mail from Zak (Ubuntu), darix (SuSE) and Ernest (Apple).

Lighttpd Goes Scons

In my daily work at MySQL I added scons as the build-system for a cross-platform, multi-language project and am very satisfied with the results. We have Unix, Windows and MacOS X as build-platforms and Java, C, PHP and Perl as programming languages and all works nicely together in a Python written build-system.

lighttpd goes now the same way, solving the nasty autotools dependencies.

Graceful Restart

With lighttpd 1.4.3 it is possible to do a graceful shutdown by sending a SIGINT to the process. It will only shutdown the server after the client connections are closed successfully without interrupting the connections.

But can this be used to implement ‘reload config on signal’ or ‘graceful restart’ ?

Spice Up for Error Page

lighttpd isn’t beautiful when it shows the user that a file is not available.

When I wrote it I want to make sure to don’t show any information that might be used for XSS attacks like displaying the URL unencoded, show local paths, … something like that. I used the simplest approach: Just show the status.

This is not pretty, but works. But I assume you want something more sexy.

Lighttpd Unleashed - Part One

From time to time we write code faster than documention. This basicly means that sometimes small gems are hidden and unknown to most users.

This time we want to put some focus on the new commandline options in lighttpd 1.4.0 and higher.

Lighttpd 1.4.1

Just a few minutes ago lighttpd 1.4.1 has been released, shortly after lighttpd 1.4.0 which had some user-visible problems.

1.4.1 fixes those bugs, stabilizes the SSL support on OpenBSD and finishes the WebDAV support in mod_webdav to Class 1 (all options except LOCK/UNLOCK).

Lighttpd 1.3.15 Released

.15 is like a best-of album from your favourite band which contains all
the good song, a few remixes and one or two new songs, just to make sure
that you buy it.

We did the same: the core stuff got bugfixes and two new modules were
added which might interest you:

  • mod_cml
Cache Meta Language Move the cache-hit decision into the webserver and only call the external language on cache-miss to speed up dynamic apps dramaticly → cluster-enabled via memcache
  • mod_trigger_b4_dl
Trigger before download For our content-providers which require that the user visitsa URL before he is allowed to download the content → cluster-enabled via memcache
Changes
-------
  * added mod_cml
  * added mod_trigger_b4_dl
  * added encoding to mod_dirlisting
  * added ?auto to mod_status
  * relaxed handling of characters in URIs even more
  * fixed detection of sendfile() on Linux 2.4.x
  * fixed comparision of buffers for short strings
  * server.errorfile-prefix is now conditional
  * fixed mod_rrdtool to close STDERR