lighttpd

A lot of people run drupal with lighttpd, a light and fast webserver, which uses FastCGI to support PHP. As lighttpd doesn't read .htaccess files, some extra config is required to get drupal's clean urls working right. I'm doing so already for a while now, finally I found the best way to do clean urls with lighttpd. I started with some url-rewriting regexes, which isn't ideal as there are problems with some special paths or dots. I've improved the regexes a bit, but still there were problems. Another common way is to use a lua-script. The big advantage of this script is that one can do the url rewriting based on the condition whether there is a file for the requested path - so no regex magic is required. Thus there also no problems with dots. The disadvantage of that approach is it's inflexibility. When you want to install multiple drupal instances in several different sub directories or use a script to generate settings for all your drupal instances, it's odd that the lua variant needs one script per drupal prefix, because you have to set the prefix in the lua script! Finally I found a way to work around this inflexibility. First off I looked into passing the prefix variable into the lua script, but I had no luck with that. So I decided to go for another approach: I wrote a simple wrapper script, that creates the needed lua script with the right prefix set on the fly. So when lighttpd parses your configuration it calls the wrapper script, which makes sure there is a lua script in place and returns the suiting configuration for your drupal installation. Ok, enough talk. Let's see how it works.