Lighttpd is an open-source web server designed for speed-critical environments. It was originally developed as POC (Proof Of Concept) by Jan Kneschke to handle 10K connections in parallel on one server.
With a low memory footprint compared to other webservers, effective management of the CPU-load, and advanced feature sets such as FastCGI, SCGI, Output-Compression, Auth, URL-Rewriting and much more makes Lighttpd the perfect solution for servers suffering load problems.
Lighttpd is licensed under the revised BSD license and runs natively on Linux operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows.
Follow me through the installation of Lighttpd on Debian 9 with PHP (through PHP-FPM) and MariaDB support.
Install Linux:
Here is the post about the installation of Debian 9 and Upgrading Debian 8 Jessie to Debian 9 Stretch. Proceed to the installation of LMP (Lighttpd v1.4.45, PHP v7, MariaDB v10.2) on Debian 9.
Log in as root account or switch to root user.
$ su
OR
$ sudo su -
Install MariaDB:
First, we will install MariaDB, a fork of MySQL by issuing the following command.
apt-get -y install mariadb-server
Start MySQL server.
systemctl start mariadb
Set MariaDB service to start automatically during every boot.
systemctl enable mariadb
I recommend you to make MariaDB secure by using the mysql_secure_installation command.
Install Lighttpd:
Latest Lighttpd is available on Debian repository, so, you can install it using the apt-get command.
apt-get -y install lighttpd
Start the Lighttpd service after the installation.
systemctl start lighttpd
Firewall:
Issue the following commands to allow HTTP (80) and HTPPS (443) request through the firewall.
ufw allow 80/tcp ufw allow 443/tcp ufw reload
Open a web browser and visit the following URL.
You should get the following page, and this confirms that you have successfully installed Lighttpd on the server.
Auto-start the Lighttpd service at your system start up.
# systemctl enable lighttpd
Install PHP5-FPM:
Now, we will install PHP through PHP-FPM (PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager). PHP-FPM is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation, and it has some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.
apt-get -y install php-fpm php-mysql
Edit php.ini file.
nano /etc/php/7.0/fpm/php.ini
set cgi.fix_pathinfo to 1.
cgi.fix_pathinfo=1
PHP-FPM listens on the UNIX socket /var/run/php7-fpm.sock by default. Edit the file “/etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf” to make PHP-FPM listens on TCP socket.
nano /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
Change the listen parameter.
FROM:
listen = /run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock
TO:
listen = 127.0.0.1:9000
Restart PHP-FPM service.
systemctl restart php7.0-fpm
Edit 15-fastcg-php.conf file.
nano /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/15-fastcgi-php.conf
Look for the below entries and change it.
FROM:
"bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi", "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php.socket",
TO:
"host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => "9000",
Enable FastCGI and FastCGI-PHP modules.
lighty-enable-mod fastcgi lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php
Restart Lighttpd service.
systemctl restart lighttpd
PHP-FPM Support on Virtual Host:
Let’s create a name based virtual host on Lighttpd server for the following details.
Server Name : server.itzgeek.local
Document Root : /var/www/html/server.itzgeek.local
Create a configuration file called itzgeek.conf in /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/.
nano /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/itzgeek.conf
Add the following content.
$HTTP["host"] == "server.itzgeek.local" { ### Domain URL
server.document-root = "/var/www/html/server.itzgeek.local" ### Document root
}
Enable the virtual host.
ln -s /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/itzgeek.conf /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/
Testing PHP-FPM support on Virtual host:
Create the document root directory and log directory.
mkdir /var/www/html/server.itzgeek.local
For testing the PHP-FPM, place a .php file on to the document root of the created virtual host.
nano /var/www/html/server.itzgeek.local/index.php
VI editor will open up a file called index.php. Copy/Paste this line into the index.php file:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Set permission.
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/
Restart the services.
systemctl restart lighttpd systemctl restart php7.0-fpm
Now open a web browser and type your domain in the web address.
In my case it is,
the page will look like below:
From the above screen shot, PHP is working, and it’s working through FPM/FastCGI, as shown in the Server API line.
Scroll further down to see modules that are already enabled in PHP, including MySQL information.
That’s all!