How to Install the Lighttpd Server on Ubuntu 22.04

Hello, friends. In this short and simple post, you will learn how to install Lighttpd on Ubuntu 22.04. You will also learn how to add PHP support.

For those who don’t know, lighttpd is a secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web server that has been optimized for high-performance environments.

One of the main things that make it so popular is that it is quite lightweight and can revive web servers.

Let’s go for it.

Install Lighttpd on Ubuntu

One of the most important advantages of Lighttpd is that it is present in the official Ubuntu 22.04 repositories, so it’s all easy.

First, connect via SSH to the server.

Then, update the whole system

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Thereafter, you can install Lighttpd from the official repositories with this command

sudo apt install lighttpd

As soon as you install it, you can check the installed version

lighttpd -version

Sample Output:

lighttpd/1.4.63 (ssl) - a light and fast webserver

Similar to Apache or Nginx, Lighttpd works as a system service. So, before using it, initialize it and have it run at system startup

sudo systemctl enable --now lighttpd

Then, you can check the status of the service

sudo systemctl status lighttpd

Sample output

● lighttpd.service - Lighttpd Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/lighttpd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2022-11-10 23:01:08 UTC; 15min ago
   Main PID: 1495 (lighttpd)
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 4538)
     Memory: 948.0K
        CPU: 410ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/lighttpd.service
             └─1495 /usr/sbin/lighttpd -D -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Nov 10 23:01:08 unixcop systemd[1]: Starting Lighttpd Daemon...
Nov 10 23:01:08 unixcop systemd[1]: Started Lighttpd Daemon.

Open the firewall ports

sudo ufw allow 80
sudo ufw allow 443
sudo ufw reload

Finally, open a browser and check http://your-server.

This indicates that it works fine.

Adding PHP support to Lighttpd

The normal thing to do is to add PHP support. First, install it

sudo apt install php php-cgi php-cli php-fpm

Now we have to add support in the Lighttpd configuration file.

Open it with any text editor

sudo vim /etc/php/*/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

And replace:

listen = /run/php/php/*-fpm.sock

For:

listen = 127.0.0.1:9000

Save the changes and close the editor.

The next step is to enable fastcgi which will be used for PHP processing. Edit the respective configuration file:

sudo vim /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/15-fastcgi-php.conf

Replace

"bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
"socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php.socket",

For these:

"host" => "127.0.0.1",
"port" => "9000",

Save the changes and close the editor.

Now, enable the FastCGI module

sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi
sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php

An restart lighttpd

sudo systemctl restart lighttpd

Testing the changes

The best way to test the changes is to create a PHP file.

sudo vim /var/www/html/test.php

And add some content

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

And I’m done.

Now open it with your favorite web browser.

Conclusion

Lighttpd is a great choice for a lightweight web server with many features.