HOWTO: Lighttpd with SSL, Rails, PHP and MySQL on OSX 10.4 (Tiger)

Apr 04 ’06

Filed in lighttpd, ruby on rails

I've run Apache on my Mac for as long as I've had OSX, using either the built-in version or the ServerLogistics package, which they don't make anymore. It always worked great, and when I started learning PHP, it was easy to install and make work. Getting SSL to work was a little bit more of a challenge, but once I found the right instructions it was a breeze.

But now I need to serve Rails as well. Getting Apache to do RoR with fcgi can be a hassle, and it's apparently slow as well, so I decided to switch to lighttpd, or lighty as it's called.

For development purposes, using the standard script/server is a no-brainer; however I want a "production" environment as well. One that can serve Rails, and legacy PHP, and do SSL for authentication, while talking to MySQL. I discovered that lighty can do all of these things, but how? Read the rest …

Lighttpd url rewrites are funny

Mar 20 ’06

Filed in lighttpd, ruby on rails

Since I've been playing around with RoR I've found the

script/server

trick for development to be fantastically useful. It's quick to use, the server itself is fast, and it's everything I could want. That is, until it's time to go in to production mode. I've been running Apache, using OSX's built-in build, but I'm considering switching my whole setup over to lighty because of the funkiness of Apache and Ruby's fcgi. So I tried it. Building lighty was really easy. Getting lighty to then serve my static pages was also very easy. Then I tried getting it to serve my ruby apps, and that's where the problems hit. Read the rest …