Comments on: HOWTO: Lighttpd with SSL, Rails, PHP and MySQL on OSX 10.4 (Tiger)

By: g.

g. — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:21:08 +0000

PS: “man launchd.plist” gives you all the keys that are possible to use in a plist that goes into one of the Lauch* folders

By: g.

g. — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:18:00 +0000

Thanks for this very concise primer, just what I was searching for. Made it very easy to set this up on 10.4.11
A note:
The “Program” key seems to be at least unnecessary - in my version launchd even refuses to run the file on startup if it’s present.
I noticed you cannot chroot/chown a process if you start it with launchd - you have to set the owner in the plist file.

You can start/stop lighttpd with launchd too: just type
> launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/
to load the new plist files you put there, then start lighttpd with
> launchctl start net.lighttpd
stop it with
> launchctl stop net.lighttpd
same works with net.lighttpd_ssl of course

for reference here’s my plist file minus the header:

Label
net.lighttpd_ssl
ProgramArguments

/usr/local/sbin/lighttpd
-f/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd_ssl.conf
-D

UserName
www
GroupName
www

By: Brent Miller

Brent Miller — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:44:31 +0000

Naisi: It’s my own. :+)

By: naisioxerloro

naisioxerloro — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:40:08 +0000

Hi.
Good design, who make it?

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:42:54 +0000

Thanks for the instructions. This was a big help in getting me up and running. Mongrel has some good info on Lighttpd/Mongrel deployment as well at: http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/lighttpd.html

By: Brent Miller

Brent Miller — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:11:49 +0000

Ulf: I don’t remember having to run launchtcl; I think that I rebooted my box, which did the trick. However, it was so long ago, that I can’t really say.

In any case, you’re welcome for the config file; I’m glad it’s helpful to someone other than me.

By: Ulf

Ulf — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:42:39 +0000

Thanks for the great sample config file! The best I found on Google…

One thing about launchd: You probably have to run the command “sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.lighttpd.plist” for launchd to recognize the new plist file, though.

By: Matte

Matte — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:47:25 +0000

Thanks for your tutorial! It’s what I was looking since many many days ago.

Lighttpd rocks! I love it

By: Mic Pringle

Mic Pringle — Tue, 16 May 2006 07:19:08 +0000

Hi Brent,

Thanks for that mate, you sorted it.

For some reason I assumed userdir.include-user = (”username”) was some sort of internal variable which picked up the current username. Doh !!

All working now

Once again, fantastic tutorial mate … I just need to figure out how to compile in the GD part of PHP and I’ve got an exact copy of my Apache setup, but instead using Lighttpd and including Rails, 5 star … great stuff.

Thanks again.

Mic

By: Brent Miller

Brent Miller — Mon, 15 May 2006 17:21:58 +0000

Mic,

What is the exact code you used in lighttpd_shared.conf? To access http://yourserver/~Mic/ it should look like this:

userdir.basepath = "/Users/"
userdir.path = "Sites"
userdir.include-user = ("Mic") # only allow requests for this user (optional)

The third line is optional, and allows you to whitelist users. You can include as many users as you want, each with their own userdir.include-user statement. If you omit all of those statements, then access is allowed for all users.

The other possibility is that you don’t have a /Users/Mic/Sites/index.html file, and so even though lighty is looking in the right place there is nothing for it to serve.

Binding to port 3500 shouldn’t make a difference, as long as the rest of the configuration is the same, so that’s not the problem.

Does this help?

By: Mic Pringle

Mic Pringle — Mon, 15 May 2006 16:58:02 +0000

Hi,

Great tutorial, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

It seems I can get everything working except for being able to access the user folders, by this I mean http://localhost:3500/~Mic/ … which just gives a 404 error.

All other requests work, including PHP on the standard doc root set in server.document-root … just not when I try to get to the users folder.

Any ideas !?

I have bound the server to port 3500 just because I wanted to test against Apache, I will swop over eventually, but need to get this working first.

Thanks

Mic