lighttpd is listening

The lightweight HTTP daemon has accepted your connection. No site configuration covers this hostname, so you are seeing the default placeholder page.

Set up a virtual host or replace the default document root contents to remove this notice.

Why lighttpd

lighttpd was designed to use as little memory as possible while serving many concurrent connections. That makes it a popular choice for small VPS instances, embedded boards and dedicated hardware where every megabyte counts.

The single-process event-loop architecture handles thousands of idle connections without spawning extra threads or processes, so memory use stays nearly flat regardless of concurrency.

Steps to bring up a site

Pick a directory for your files, for example /var/www/yoursite.
Drop your HTML, CSS, JS and any static assets in.
Edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and adjust server.document-root or add a conditional $HTTP["host"] == "yourdomain" block.
Validate the config with lighttpd -tt -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf.
Reload with sudo systemctl reload lighttpd.

Modules

mod_fastcgi — the standard bridge to PHP and friends.
mod_proxy — reverse-proxy mode.
mod_rewrite — URL rewriting.
mod_auth — basic and digest authentication.
mod_evhost — pattern-based virtual hosting.

Logs

Errors are written to /var/log/lighttpd/error.log. Access entries land in access.log next to it. Run tail -f on both while you make changes so you see the daemon's perspective in real time. Log rotation is handled by the system logrotate configuration shipped with the package.

Project page: lighttpd.net.

srv-min-3 · lighttpd