Running WordPress with lighttpd

In most of the tutorials about WordPress, it presumes you have Apache as a web server. I use lighttpd, however. Especially on a server with not a lot of power, this can make a big difference. Getting WordPress to run on lighttpd is not very difficult. You can follow the normal installation instructions. In fact, you only need to do something special if you want to use permalinks without index.php in it, and/or want to have the multisite feature in WordPress 3 (or the older WordPress MU). The instructions below are for WordPress 3 Multisite with multi blogs.

First, configure your site in the lighttpd config file. I use the (almost) default configuration file, /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf At the end of this file, I placed
include "sites.conf"
This allows to have all information about the different sites in a separate config file. To add a WordPress site, simply add
$HTTP["host"] =~ "server.vijge.net" {
server.document-root = "/home/www/wordpress"
var.wp_blog = 1
include "wpmu-rewrite.conf"
}

The host is the address of the site. The document-root is the location where WordPress is installed. var.wp_blog is the ID of the blog. The ID can be found in the Network admin section of WordPress. Click on the top-right on the Admin drop down menu and choose Network Admin. Choose All sites from the left menu. Here, all blog sites are listed. The link for each site contains the ID of the blog.
wpmu-rewrite.conf is a file that does the rewriting for permalinks and files in a multisite setup. The contents of this file is:
url.rewrite-once = (
"^/(.*)?/?files/(.*)" => "/wp-content/blogs.dir/"+var.wp_blog+"/files/$2",
"^/(wp-(content|admin|includes).*)$" => "/$1",
"^/favicon.ico$" => "$0",
"^/xmlrpc.php$" => "$0",
"^/(.*)$" => "/index.php/$1",
)


Save the files sites.conf and wpmu-rewrite.conf in the /etc/lighttpd directory and restart the web server, and it should work. The trick with setting the ID for each blog allows loading images without the need of PHP. You can also use the following code, in which case you do not need var.wp_blog:
"^/(.*)?/?files/(.*)" => "wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2", With this code, for every image, a PHP script is executed.

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