This section contains notes and hints specific to Lighttpd 1.4 installs of PHP on Unix systems.
Please use the » Lighttpd trac to learn how to install Lighttpd properly before continuing.
FastCGI is the preferred SAPI to connect PHP and Lighttpd. FastCGI is automagically enabled in php-cgi.
To configure Lighttpd to connect to PHP and spawn FastCGI processes, edit lighttpd.conf. Sockets are preferred to connect to FastCGI processes on the local system.
Example #1 Partial lighttpd.conf
server.modules += ( "mod_fastcgi" ) fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => (( "socket" => "/tmp/php.socket", "bin-path" => "/usr/local/bin/php-cgi", "bin-environment" => ( "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16", "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000" ), "min-procs" => 1, "max-procs" => 1, "idle-timeout" => 20 )) )
The bin-path directive allows lighttpd to spawn FastCGI processes dynamically. PHP will spawn children according to the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN environment variable. The bin-environment directive sets the environment for the spawned processes. PHP will kill a child process after the number of requests specified by PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS is reached. The directives min-procs and max-procs should generally be avoided with PHP. PHP manages its own children and opcode caches like APC will only share among children managed by PHP. If min-procs is set to something greater than 1, the total number of php responders will be multiplied PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN (2 min-procs * 16 children gives 32 responders).
Lighttpd provides a program called spawn-fcgi to make the process of spawning FastCGI processes easier.
It is possible to spawn processes without spawn-fcgi, though a bit of heavy-lifting is required. Setting the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN environment var controls how many children PHP will spawn to handle incoming requests. Setting PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS will determine how long (in requests) each child will live. Here's a simple bash script to help spawn php responders.
Example #2 Spawning FastCGI Responders
#!/bin/sh # Location of the php-cgi binary PHP=/usr/local/bin/php-cgi # PID File location PHP_PID=/tmp/php.pid # Binding to an address #FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS=10.0.1.1:10000 # Binding to a domain socket FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS=/tmp/php.sock PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=16 PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=10000 env -i PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=$PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN \ PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=$PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS \ $PHP -b $FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS & echo $! > "$PHP_PID"
FastCGI instances can be spawned on multiple remote machines in order to scale applications.
Example #3 Connecting to remote php-fastcgi instances
fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => (( "host" => "10.0.0.2", "port" => 1030 ), ( "host" => "10.0.0.3", "port" => 1030 )) )