In this new post to his blog Chad Lung walks you through the process of getting Lighttpd (web server), PHP and MySQL installed on a Ubuntu-based system. His specific installation is 10.10, but the instructions can be translated easily to most common versions.

Sometimes you don't want Apache for your web server whatever your reasons might be. There are other options like Nginx and Lighttpd, today I'll setup Lighttpd along with PHP (via FastCGI) and MySQL.

The Ubuntu package manager (apt-get/aptitude) takes a lot of the work out of it for you, installing the packages and dependencies. A few minimal changes to some configuration files for FastCGI and configuring the Lighttpd server and you'll be up and running in no time.

In a new post to the Bollysite Blog there's a look at how to get better performance out of your Lighttpd web server with xcache.

A typical PHP application and most of the frameworks uses "The Loop"� method to code the website. Whenever request comes to website, It's typically sent to index page to handle every parameters. [...] We can use xcache variables to store entire web page and serve it from RAM.

They include some basic benchmarks showing the impact that caching an have on a site as well as code that you can use to integrate their xcache library into your site. The library uses the XCache functionality to store the rendered output of the page for a default of three hours time.

On HowToForge.com there's a new tutorial on how to get the combination of Lighttpd, PHP and MySQL up and running on an OpenSuse linux installation.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11.1 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Most of the software installation is handled via packages installed by the "yast2" package manager but you'll still need to go in and modify some of the configuration files to get PHP and Lighttpd to play nicely together. Besides the MySQL package required for PHP's MySQL support, they also suggest getting a few other packages for things like SOAP, SQLite, IMAP, zlib and openssl.

In a new post to his blog today Derick Rethans talks about his move to what he calls his "PHP Development Environment 2.0" - an upgrade to some of his sites and servers prompted by an update of the Xdebug website.

I'd heard a lot about lighttpd and decided to give that a try - yes, that meant something that I didn't really know to well was going to run in a production environment. Unlike Apache, with lighttpd PHP doesn't run as a module, but instead you run it out of process with something called FastCGI.

He talks about his transition to this new web server and how he wanted to replace his current setup of having to use multiple static modules for PHP and having to recompile each time he wanted to use one of them. A few scripts later and a few modifications to the lighttpd configuration file later and he had a working installation with multiple versions of PHP running on multiple ports.

Recently Evert Pot has been having some issues with setting up lighttpd and PHP (fastcgi) for one of his web servers:

In trying to get more out of our webservers using a Lighttpd and PHP-FastCGI setup, I've come across some major issues that make it difficult to use. I hope this post will warn people of some of the bugs they might encounter and workaround that might need to be implemented until some of these are fixed.

He ran up against two problems - that the parent PHP-CGI process spawns off the configured number of children correctly but with the lighttpd server is killed, they don't get released and that, once you hit full capacity for the PHP backend lighttpd starts serving up 500 errors.

In the comments for the post several others have offered some advice on things that might help (like different config settings and even using XCache to prevent the 500s issue from coming up again).

Dave Dash has posted a configuration that he had shared with him for getting nginx and the symfony framework to work happily together.

I almost gave up on nginx and was going to settle on lighttpd or Apache, but I decided to check the symfony list and in minutes Kiril Angov (Kupokomapa) answered with a working nginx configuration. This is why I like the symfony community.

He includes the config in an easy to use/c&p kind of format so you can drop it into your install and get it up and running quick.

HowTo Forge has a new tutorial posted on installing a Lighttpd web server on a Mandriva linux system and including PHP and MySQL support:

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Mandriva 2008.0 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

Thanks to the urpmi package manager in Mandriva, installation of the software is just a matter of a few simple "install" calls. There's a little bit to configure - the MySQL credentials and the php.ini file - but it's a quick and easy setup for your system.

The HowTo Forge website has a new installation tutorial posted today showing how to get the combination of Lighttpd, PHP5, MySQL and Fedora 7 up and running.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 7 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

There's about six steps to the process, including getting all of the packages. Thankfully, there's very little configuration you'll need to do. Since Lighttpd uses the FastCGI component to load in PHP support, there's no need for compiling. It's as easy as grabbing the packages and making them play nicely together. Configuration file changes (examples) are included to almost make it as easy as a cut & paste.

In a new post Edin Kadribasic shares his method for getting a Serendipity (a popular PHP-based blogging system) website up and running on a lighttpd server.

Well the basic install went pretty smoothly, but I wanted, of course, to use "friendly" URLs. For that Serendipity supplies .htaccess file with Apache mod_rewrite rules. With a little bit of effort it was possible for me to convert those into rewrite rules that lighttpd would understand.

He includes all of the rewrite rules lighttpd needs to mimic the responses of an Apache server in a rewrite-once statement, and a limitation on the files the server can send with an access-deny config line.

Tobias Schlitt has, for a personal project, put together a comparison of caching with two different web servers he's building applications with - Apache and Lighttpd.

For a little private project, which makes extensive use of caching, I recently checked, where I could get gather some more performance from.

He had been pointed towards Lighttpd by Kore (who recommended it based on his experience with it). So, Tobias tested the application on both of the two servers with somewhat predictable results (see image). Apache was slower in most cases and quite a bit slower when it came to working with larger files.