Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.3

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 10/21/2009

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a CentOS 5.3 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

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

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

2 Installing MySQL 5.0

First we install MySQL 5.0 like this:

yum install mysql mysql-server

Then we create the system startup links for MySQL (so that MySQL starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start the MySQL server:

chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Create a password for the MySQL user root (replace yourrootsqlpassword with the password you want to use):

mysqladmin -u root password yourrootsqlpassword
mysqladmin -h server1.example.com -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

3 Installing Lighttpd

Lighttpd is not available from the official CentOS 5.3 repositories, but from the RPMforge repositories (see http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/FAQ.php#B2 for instructions). We install the RPMforge package for RHEL 5 which works for CentOS 5.3 as well:

If you are on an x86_64 system:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

If you are on an i386 system:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Afterwards, we can install Lighttpd like this:

yum install lighttpd

Then we create the system startup links for Lighttpd (so that Lighttpd starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start it:

chkconfig --levels 235 lighttpd on
/etc/init.d/lighttpd start

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100, and you should see the following page:

Lighttpd's default document root is /srv/www/lighttpd on CentOS 5.3 (there's no index file in that directory like index.html, that's why you get a 404 Not Found error), and the configuration file is /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf.

4 Installing PHP5

We can make PHP5 work in Lighttpd through FastCGI. Therefore we install the packages lighttpd-fastcgi and php-cli:

yum install lighttpd-fastcgi php-cli