lighty's life

lighty developer blog

PRE-RELEASE: Lighttpd 1.4.22rc2-r2405

As a followup to rc1 of 1.4.22, rc2 has been published with 3 additional bugfixes.
Two of which are for FreeBSD users, the other one relating to mod_scgi.

You can get the pre-release from these urls:
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.22rc2-r2405.tar.gz
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.22rc2-r2405.tar.bz2
SHA1 checksum:
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.22rc2-r2405.sha1sum

MD5 checksum:
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.22rc2-r2405.md5sum


Please test it as much as possible and provide us with feedback.
A lot of testing ensures a good release.
If no showstoppers are encountered, there will be a final release soon.

PRE-RELEASE: Lighttpd 1.4.22rc1-r2402

Unfortunately there was a bug introduced with version 1.4.21 of lighttpd which rendered the default vhost in mod_simple_vhost broken (always 404).

Therefor we would like to draw your attention to this new testing version.

You can get the pre-release from these urls:
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.22rc1-r2402.tar.gz
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.22rc1-r2402.tar.bz2
SHA1 checksum:
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.22rc1-r2402.sha1sum

MD5 checksum:
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.22rc1-r2402.md5sum


Please test it as much as possible and provide us with feedback.
A lot of testing ensures a good release.
If no showstoppers are encountered, there will be a final release soon.

Prerelease of Spawn-fcgi 1.6.0 (Rc1-r16)

spawn-fcgi extracted into own project


There are several versions of spawn-fcgi (one in lighttpd 1.4.x, one in 1.5.x and one in cherokee), which makes packaging very hard (e.g.: debian packages spawn-fcgi from lighty as “spawn-fcgi.lighttpd” – making usage complicated as your scripts are probably just using “spawn-fcgi”).
Additionally, keeping the sources and bug fixes synchronized is just too much work (ok, the one in cherokee isn’t our problem :) ).
Therefore we decided to split spawn-fcgi into a new project which will start with version 1.6.0 (and will be independent of lighttpd releases or versions).

We plan to remove spawn-fcgi from lighttpd-1.4.x after the release of 1.4.22.

In case you would like to test a spawn-fcgi version with more features (options for chowning the socket), see here: http://cgit.stbuehler.de/gitosis/spawn-fcgi/about/ (needs glib)


You can find the new project at redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki

1.4.21 Released

Just in case you didn’t see the announcement on the main page: click

Please head over there for more information.

PRE-RELEASE: 1.4.21-r2392

We would like to draw your attention to the latest pre-release of the stable 1.4 branch of lighttpd.

You can get the pre-release from these urls:
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.21rc1-r2392.tar.gz
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.21rc1-r2392.tar.bz2
SHA1 checksum:
www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.21rc1-r2392.sha1sum


Please test it as much as possible and provide us with feedback.
A lot of testing ensures a good release.
If no showstoppers are encountered, there will be a final release soon.

A Little Heads Up

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.

Going to Mine

Ladies and Gentlemen, Spambots and Jackalopes, may we have your valuable attention please.

As you may have noticed, our trac was painfully slow most of the time and we missed some features that we would like to have. So we looked for alternatives and found Redmine

It took some effort to migrate everything from trac to it but now most of it is done.
Some wiki pages couldn’t be converted 1:1, so we ask you to fix the formatting issues if you come across any and know how to do so.

Redmine also allows us to get rid of the old forums that had serious spam problems in the past.

trac.lighttpd.net will be read-only from now on and forum.lighttpd.net will probably be gone for good or read-only too.


So, without further ado, we want to unveil our new project haven.


Hope you like it and thanks for using lighty.

1.4.20 Released

Just in case you didn’t see the announcement on the main page: click

Please head over there for more information.