I spent some hours in the airport of Hong-Kong and wanted to get the 1.3.x branch running on cygwin in combination with PHP via FastCGI. On the road I most often work under Windows on my Laptop and being able to really test it under every platform, even cygwin is a nice to have.

It was already spawned automaticly by the internal spawner after I had compiled PHP in cygwin myself with FastCGI support. The only thing missing was a working FastCGI handler. Debugging in cygwin is a lot harder than doing the same under Linux as the strace is tracing the emulated environment and not the native system calls:

$ strace —mask=syscall .libs/lighttpd.exe -D -f ./lighttpd.conf

Adding a bunch of log_error_write() statements in the mod_fastcgi.c code somewhen revealed what is really going on. I still wonder why it ever worked at all :)

changeset 343 is the final result of this debug session and will be part of 1.3.14 moving the ‘please send me FDEVENT_IN’ before we return with WAIT_FOR_EVENT. This also removes the ‘I got FDEVENT_OUT and don’t know way’ messages than sometimes appeared.

i’m moo, new to lighttpd

As many of you might ask: “how do i write cond1 AND cond2”. we have the answer in 1.4

i focused on the configuration of the upcoming lighttpd1.4. i made many improvements to her.

One of the most noticeable change is nesting and chaining, as you might already known as “and” / “else”:

cond_a {

  cond_b {

  }

}

else cond_c {

}

also, “user-defined” variable and “include” is impemented. if you used to copy/paste many of your config for each vhost, u can now put them into a sub config file, and even use the variable:

. in lighttpd.conf

$HTTP[“host”] == “t1.lighttpd.net”{

  var.name=“t1”

  include “myvhost.conf”

}

$HTTP[“host”] == “t2.lighttpd.net”{

  var.name=“t2”

  include “myvhost.conf”

}

. in myvhost.conf

server.name = var.name + “.lighttpd.net”

server.document-root = “/mydocroot/” + var.name + “/public_html/”

you can also use config values such as server.name + “/…”, and even use env.* to get environment variable

i’ve also implemented(but not commited yet) “include_shell”, which parse the output of program which convert some on the fly. for example:

include “mysub.conf”


	
compare the above line to the following

include_shell “/usr/bin/convmimetype /etc/mime.types”
	
same as mime.assign = array(…)

notice the above is all at config parsing time(when loading config), so no performance lost. runtime variable isn’t implemented yet. i have no idea how it should be implemented exactly, nor do i know how to avoid hurting performance.

there are more, optimization for runtime condition checking, pcre_study speed up for regex matching, new command line options(check with -h).

FIY, before i implement these things. i myself use m4, a macro language to write the config. it’s powerful but ugly and dirty, and is just a brain dead game. i can use variable/include in m4, but not output “else” “and”. but i can now do all what i needed in lighttpd alone without m4.

check news when 1.4 is out, or check svn :)

A few days ago I’ve sent out a message about the logo contest and I already received a nice set of proposals. The idea was to collect some ideas for a while and see how they develop. My current favorites are the one by Tobin Jones and Matt Wood as they cover the idea of the word light the best.