hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0020.txt

Episode: 20
Title: HPR0020: lighttpd
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0020/hpr0020.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:20:46

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Music
Okay, hey everybody, this is Chess Griffin from the Linux reality podcast.
This is my first hacker public radio episode, so it's good to be here.
I think it's awesome that this show is up and running and there's been some really great
episodes so far, so hopefully my little contribution will fit right in.
What I wanted to talk about in this episode was the Lighty web server.
Lighty is a web server just like Apache, I think most of us have probably used Apache at least.
Those of us that have used Linux or BSD or something, Apache being the A in Lamp for Linux
Apache, my SQL and PHP.
Apache is certainly probably one of the most well-known and probably the most popular web server.
That's out there, I've used Apache at run several of my sites, it's great, I mean you can't
go wrong with Apache, but Lighty is another web server and I've been using it lately on some
smaller sites and I really like it and so I wanted to kind of talk about it and just let people
know about it and maybe people will check it out and try it.
It's been around for several years.
Lighty is spelled L-I-G-H-T-T-P-D and so they pronounce it Lighty and it's a much smaller piece
of software.
I don't remember the exact size of the source tarball for Apache.
I feel like it's somewhere five, six megabytes, something like that, but Lighty is less than
a meg.
I think I just downloaded it recently, I think it was about 800 kilobytes, so it's pretty
small and it compiles very quickly and of course most Linux distributions and the VSDs all
have a port or package for Lighty, so it's pretty easy to install and even if you need
to compile it from source it's a simple install, it's just a typical .configure make-make install.
But what I like about Lighty is that it's very small, it's very light, I guess that's
where the name comes from.
It's super fast and they tout it as being really ultra secure.
Now I'm not a security expert, I don't audit code, so I can't really speak to whether
or not Lighty is more or less secure than Apache.
But from an end user's perspective or from assist admins perspective, what I like about
Lighty is again just how simple it is to get going and to install.
Lighty has a single configuration file and that's kind of the main thing I wanted to talk
about, the old Apache, Apache 1.3 series, I seem to recall having a single configuration
file, usually it was HTTP.conf or maybe Apache.conf.
But nowadays there's still a single configuration file, but Apache 2, I think at least from the
way I see it, has become more modular, I mean they've split out different configuration
sections, like if you're going to have virtual hosting you're going to put them in different
sub-directories for sites available and then you're going to create a SIM link and make
it into sites enabled to enable a separate virtual host.
There may be a different file for any of the modules that you need to activate.
It just seems to be a lot more split up, the configuration files and what not for Apache
2.
Lighty though is kind of like the old Apache, Apache 1.3 and that it has a single configuration
file and it's lighty.conf, so it's L-I-G-H-T-T-P-D.conf and usually on most systems I've
seen it exists in slash Etsy slash Lighty, on the BSD's I run free BSD and in there of
course everything's in USR local, so it's USR, it's slash USR slash local slash Etsy slash
Lighty, that's where you'll find the configuration file.
But there's a sample configuration file in the documentation section or folder of the
tarball, just the base tarball that you can download from the Lighty website, so you can
see what the configuration file looks like and it's pretty short, I mean I printed it
out and it's only like four pages long, four or five pages long and it's really well
commented.
That's what's nice about this configuration file, as is Apache's configuration file of
course, but basically the way this works is the configuration file, I mean it's broken
up into sections and the first section, the first 30 lines or so are just different modules
that you can enable, like ALIS or redirect or the user directory module, if you want
to have a user directory in each user's home, there's a CGI, fast CGI, there's all different
kinds of modules, the rewrite module if you need to rewrite URLs, you can enable that.
And all that you need to do to enable these mods is just simply uncomment the line and
of course restart Lighty.
Continuing on, there's a single line where you can set the document root for the server,
if it's just going to be a single host, if you're going to do virtual hosting, there's
a different place for that.
But if you have just a single host, it's a one line to set the document root.
Some cool things I like about Lighty in the configuration as opposed to Apache.
Some things are so much easier, like for example, in Apache, if you want to, if you want to set
up, let's say you want to enable directory browsing in some directories and not in other
directories.
Well, in Apache, you may have to create a block in the configuration file for each of the
directories.
And then there's an option in there, I think it's options, I think it's option plus indexes,
I think that might be what it is.
But here in Lighty, so there's, you have to do it on a per directory basis, and of course
you do that here in Lighty as well, but it's much fewer lines and it's much easier.
And you know, when you were first reading an Apache configuration file, if you didn't
know what options plus indexes was, you may not know that that's the option to configure
directory listings.
But here, the option is, let's see here, I just had it.
I think it's, I think it's server.directorylisting.activate, something like that.
I mean, it's a very, it's a very plain English configuration line.
That's not it exactly.
I can't, I can't actually find, I can't find it while I'm looking at this configuration
file.
But the point is, the options that are available that you can enable or disable, it's,
it's very easy to understand in the Lighty configuration file.
Another example is if you want to password protect certain directories, with, with a
Apache, you know, you can use, use the, the .ht access file, hidden file, and you can
set a .ht password file where you can put in a user and the MD5 some hash of the person's
password.
And you know, I'm sure that most people that have set up Apache, you know, know what I'm
talking about on how to set that up.
And in Lighty, it's similar, but it's great because you can do it all within the configuration
file.
You can, you can, you can turn on the off module for authentication.
And you can set up what the back end is.
You can set up the name of the user file or the group file.
And you can, then you can list the directories that require different, you know, that require
passwords.
So you sort of have like the .ht access information within the Lighty configuration file.
It's the same amount of information for the most part, but it's just nice that not
have to have separate files, you know, for each directory.
You can just put it all in one configuration file.
You can, of course, break some of this out.
You can have separate, you can do, you know, do, and includes in the Lighty configuration
file and, and have separate files for different pieces if you want, if you want to make it
modular in other words, but you don't need to.
So you can set up, you know, URL, rewriting, again, instead of having a separate .ht access
file like an Apache, you can do it all within the configuration file.
And it's very simple to set up virtual hosting.
There's a, there's a very well-commented examples, both in the Lighty documentation and
in the configuration file on how to set up virtual hosts.
So you can, you can do that very simply.
So that's, you know, kind of Lighty in the nutshell, it's smaller.
I think it's faster, simpler to configure than Apache.
It may not be as powerful as Apache.
It may be more powerful.
I don't really, you know, I don't really know people benchmark stuff.
I know there were some benchmarking done, done, I think within the last year.
And I think it showed Lighty being, you know, much faster and scalable than Apache.
But, you know, benchmarks are benchmarks.
You never really know how that, how that will, how that really plays out in real life.
Lighty's a nice alternative.
I run it on some personal sites and, and different things and, you know, couldn't be happier.
It's cool, it's fun and something different to play with.
So definitely check it out.
All right.
That'll do it.
Thanks.
Thank you for listening to Half Republic Radio.
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