Installing Drupal 6.4 On A Lighttpd Web Server (Debian Etch)

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Submitted by falko (Contact Author) (Forums) on Thu, 2008-09-11 18:16. :: Debian | Lighttpd

Installing Drupal 6.4 On A Lighttpd Web Server (Debian Etch)

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
Last edited 09/02/2008

This guide explains how you can install Drupal 6.4 on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch. Drupal comes with an .htaccess file with mod_rewrite rules (for Apache) that do not work on lighttpd. Without this .htaccess file it is not possible to have clean URLs in your Drupal installation. Fortunately there's a way to make lighttpd behave as if it could read the .htaccess file.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Preliminary Note

I have tested this on a Debian Etch server where lighttpd and PHP5 are already installed and working (e.g. like in this tutorial). I'll use the hostname www.example.com and lighttpd's default document root /var/www (where I will install Drupal) in this tutorial for demonstration purposes. Of course, you can use any other vhost as well, but you might have to adjust your lighttpd.conf.

 

2 Installing mod_magnet

I will use a file called drupal.lua that contains the rewrite rules needed by Drupal (e.g. for clean URLs). Lighttpd needs the module mod_magnet so that it can understand the drupal.lua file. Therefore we install mod_magnet...

apt-get install lighttpd-mod-magnet

... and enable it:

lighty-enable-mod magnet

Next we download the drupal.lua file:

cd /etc/lighttpd
wget http://nordisch.org/drupal.lua

(If the download link doesn't work for some reason, here's the content of the drupal.lua file: 

-- little helper function
function file_exists(path)
  local attr = lighty.stat(path)
  if (attr) then
      return true
  else
      return false
  end
end
function removePrefix(str, prefix)
  return str:sub(1,#prefix+1) == prefix.."/" and str:sub(#prefix+2)
end

-- prefix without the trailing slash
local prefix = '/drupal'

-- the magic ;)
if (not file_exists(lighty.env["physical.path"])) then
    -- file still missing. pass it to the fastcgi backend
    request_uri = removePrefix(lighty.env["uri.path"], prefix)
    if request_uri then
      lighty.env["uri.path"]          = prefix .. "/index.php"
      local uriquery = lighty.env["uri.query"] or ""
      lighty.env["uri.query"] = uriquery .. (uriquery ~= "" and "&" or "") .. "q=" .. request_uri
      lighty.env["physical.rel-path"] = lighty.env["uri.path"]
      lighty.env["request.orig-uri"]  = lighty.env["request.uri"]
      lighty.env["physical.path"]     = lighty.env["physical.doc-root"] .. lighty.env["physical.rel-path"]
    end
end
-- fallthrough will put it back into the lighty request loop
-- that means we get the 304 handling for free. ;)

)

Because I want to install Drupal directly in the document root (/var/www) and not in a subdirectory, I open /etc/lighttpd/drupal.lua and change local prefix = '/drupal' to local prefix = '':

vi /etc/lighttpd/drupal.lua

[...]
-- prefix without the trailing slash
local prefix = ''
[...]

Next I open /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and change the values of index-file.names and url.access-deny and add a line for magnet.attract-physical-path-to:

vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

[...]
## files to check for if .../ is requested
#index-file.names           = ( "index.php", "index.html",
#                               "index.htm", "default.htm" )
index-file.names           = ( "index.php" )

## Use the "Content-Type" extended attribute to obtain mime type if possible
# mimetype.use-xattr = "enable"

#### accesslog module
accesslog.filename         = "/var/log/lighttpd/access.log"

## deny access the file-extensions
#
# ~    is for backupfiles from vi, emacs, joe, ...
# .inc is often used for code includes which should in general not be part
#      of the document-root
#url.access-deny            = ( "~", ".inc" )
url.access-deny = ( "~", ".inc", ".engine", ".install", ".module", ".sh", "sql", ".theme", ".tpl.php", ".xtmpl", "Entries", "Repository", "Root" )

magnet.attract-physical-path-to = ( "/etc/lighttpd/drupal.lua" )
[...]

Finally I restart lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Lighttpd is now ready for Drupal 6.4.


Copyright © 2008 Falko Timme
All Rights Reserved.
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mod-magnet can mess up cgi scripts
Submitted by Daniel (not registered) on Tue, 2010-05-25 13:34.

nice how-to. Thank you very much.

 

One remark : if you have a cgi script on the same server that relies on using parts of the URI as args, this mod-magnet script will break it.

 For instance, dadamail uses something like:

 http://myserver.com/cgi-bin/mail.cgi

 (which works fine) but also expects to get things like

http://myserver.com/cgi-bin/mail.cgi/some/args

(which gives a 404 from lighty).

 

The workaround I used is to do something like :

 

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^cgi-bin" {
   cgi.assign = ( ".cgi" => "/usr/bin/perl" )
} else $HTTP["url"] !~ "^cgi-bin" {
   magnet.attract-physical-path-to = ( "/etc/lighttpd/drupal.lua" )
}

 (and no, I still don't get why lighty doesn't support a simple if/else ... but whatever ... )

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