I'm on lighty!

I’m now getting to the point where I can release an early iteration of the Sureboss shopping cart into production. So it’s only natural I started to consider the production environment a little more.

I’ve done some reading, and although I’m currently running Apache 2.x and FCGI, I’ve read a couple of things that hint that it’s perhaps a little unstable:

Since I’m looking at having at least 2 applications in production, both of which are critical (one of which extremely critical—it’ll probably have to end up on it’s own VPS), I decided it’d be safe to just use lighttpd, especially since the only dynamic content is generated through Rails.

I followed James Duncan Davidson’s setting up lighty guide and was up and running in almost no time. The only slight tweak was to ensure that it loaded automatically when the machine booted—just in case the host or VPS goes down. Fortunately I found just the startup script I needed, and then just had to setup some symbolic links to point to it from inside the other init directories:

1. rc0.d
2. rc3.d
3. rc6.d

This ensures that the daemon shuts down and starts up correctly. I’m not enough of a *nix guru to know why I couldn’t use chkconfig on my RHEL4-based VPS to set it up but this seems to work fine!

At the moment the DNS record for this blog still resolves to the Apache 2 service, but, I’ll organise changing it over as soon as possible. In the meantime, this blog running on lighttpd is currently on http://www.oobaloo.co.uk:8080 should you prefer to use that.

All I need to do now is setup some virtual hosting on lighttpd for the other domains.