Getting PyBlosxom SCGI working under Lighttpd

2006-01-17T09:13:00-08:00

Took another whack at getting PyBlosxom/SCGI working with Lighttpd, this time with better success. (I'm still getting up-to-speed with Lighttpd). This is working with the exact same SCGI setup I was working on the other day.

To elaborate a bit, the setup I'm trying to achieve is to:

Have the blog to be completely under "/blog/" in the URL namespace
Not get it confused with anything else that begins with "/blog" such as "/blog2".
Use "/blog/static/" URLs for serving static resources like CSS stylesheets and images off the disk (instead of running those requests through PyBlosxom's CGI code).

This is what I ended up with, seems to work fairly well, and I'm impressed with how Lighttpd makes it easy to put together a understandable configuration.

#
# External redirection to add a trailing "/" if exactly 
# "/blog" is requested
#
url.redirect = (
                "^/blog$" => "http://barryp.org:81/blog/",
               )

#
# The PyBlosxom Blog, lives under the "/blog/" url namespace
#
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/blog/" {
    #
    # Static resources served from the disk
    #
    $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/blog/static/" {
        alias.url = ("/blog/static/" => "/data/blog/static/")
    }

    #
    # Everything non-static goes through SCGI
    #
    $HTTP["url"] !~ "^/blog/static/" {
        scgi.server = ( "/blog" => (
                                     (
                                     "host" => "127.0.0.1",
                                     "port" => 8040,
                                     "check-local" => "disable",
                                     )
                                   )
        )
    }
}

Lighttpd matching default virtual hosts.

2006-01-14T09:36:23-08:00

While taking a look at Lightttpd, found that it didn't seem possible to setup a condition that only acted if a host wasn't specified in the request header. Filed ticket 458 in the Lighttpd Trac, so that a config could use

$HTTP["host"] == ""

Currently, a non-specified host is stored as a NULL, and comparisons to NULL always fail.

Otherwise Lighttpd seems fairly decent, and has some advantages to running CGIs in that you can easily suexec them to run under other userids. Apache only seems to want to do that for virtual hosts or personal user folders - not arbitrary CGIs in non-user folders.

Fun with ones and zeros - lighttpd

Getting PyBlosxom SCGI working under Lighttpd

Lighttpd matching default virtual hosts.