Lighttpd is an open-source Web Server and it is a great alternative to Apache and Nginx. Lighttpd is designed to be fast and secure. At present time, a large number of popular web sites are powered by Lighttpd and that is the reason why we have chosen to show you how to install Lighttpd on your CentOS VPS. It is very simple, so let’s start.
First of all, update all of your system software to the latest version available with the following command:
## yum update
Once the update of your system software is finished, it is time to install the Lighttpd web server on your Linux VPS. You can do this using one simple command:
## yum install lighttpd
This command will install the Lighttpd web server so if you plan to use Lighttpd as your primary web server, it is time to remove Apache or Nginx from your system.
Next thing you need to do is to test the web server. You can do this by typing the IP address of your server into your favorite web browser. If everything is OK, you should get something like this:
In case you spot some error, you should check if Lighttpd is started on your Linux virtual server. If Lighttpd is not started you can use the following command to start it:
## /etc/init.d/lighttpd start
To configure the Lighttpd web server according to your needs, you will need to edit the main configuration file. The main configuration file is /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and you can edit it using your favorite text editor. For instance, you can use nano text editor by typing the following command:
## nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
Another thing that you might want to do is to configure your web server to serve PHP based web sites and to connect your web server to your database server. To do this you will need to enable the appropriate modules. To enable/disable modules you should edit the /etc/lighttpd/modules.conf file using the command:
## nano /etc/lighttpd/modules.conf
For further information about how to use and configure Lighttpd web server, you can visit the official web site:
http://www.lighttpd.net/
