How To Install Lighttpd Service

Since lighttpd is a maintained package for Unbuntu, all we have to do is follow the Ubuntu install instructions.

sudo apt-get install lighttpd

Security

Once installed, you may want to tighten security a bit.

cd ~
vi .profile
# change umask to 027 and save
umask 027 # to apply to current session

Sitebuild Script

Now we can create a build script for our site. Go to the directory your Jekyll code is in and create sitebuild.sh containing

#!/bin/bash
docroot="/var/www/html"
sudo -- sh -c "umask 0027; bundle exec jekyll build -d $docroot"
sudo chown -R root:www-data $docroot
sudo chmod -R o-rwx,g-w $docroot

Hopefully this will ensure that none of your site files have any lingering read attributes that they should not.

Finally, you will want to edit your _config.yml and add the following to the end (or at least uncomment some)

exclude:
  - sitebuild.sh
  - Gemfile
  - Gemfile.lock
  - node_modules
  - vendor/bundle/
  - vendor/cache/
  - vendor/gems/
  - vendor/ruby/

Now we can build our site and test it

chmod u+x sitebuild.sh
./sitebuild.sh
lynx localhost

If your happy with the content, then we can commit the changes to github

git add -A
git commit -m "automated our site build"
git push

Sweeten config

To turn on an access log, you will want to enable the module and the configuration option in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

server.modules = (
        ...
        "mod_accesslog",
        ...
)

accesslog.filename          = "/var/log/lighttpd/access.log"

To enable our Jekyll 404 message, add the following…

server.error-handler-404    = "/404.html"

Since we are running on a very small instance, I made the following changes to reduce the server load

server.max-request-size     = 65536
server.max-write-idle       = 30
server.max-read-idle        = 10
server.max-connections      = 32
server.max-fds              = 64

Open firewall

Finally if your satisfied with your content, you can open up port 80 on your GCE vm to start serving the site with the following gcloud command

gcloud config set compute/zone {zone}
gcloud compute instances add-tags {vm-name} --tags "http-server"

Further tasks

Some other tasks you may want done.

1. Get an SSL cert
2. Roll out your SSL cert and move site to port 443
3. Build latest version of lighttpd
4. Setup reverse proxy to serve up other services through lighttpd.