Installing Drupal 6.4 On A Lighttpd Web Server (Debian Etch)
Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
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.
