Install Lighttpd with PHP FastCGI on Ubuntu 8.10
In my attempts to performance tune the blog I’ve been looking at alternate web servers, primarily lighttpd. One of the initial issues that I had with an attempted migration was that of enabling php. With Apache php had been simple, but lighttpd needed a bit more.
To install a php fastcgi enabled web server using lighttpd you’ll need the following packages:
sudo aptitude install lighttpd php5-cgi
The trick after installing is to activate the fastcgi module included with lighttpd. This is done using:
sudo lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi
sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd reload
In order to test this you can create a file within your document root (likely /var/www/) called info.php, with the following contents (remove the excess spaces):
< ? php
phpinfo();
? >
Now you should be able to access your site, http://example.com/info.php. If you get a fancy list of php options you’re done!