It’s super useful to be able to make simple, local websites. This is just a quick and dirty thing that gets an index.html on the local net ASAP. I’ll make a longer version of this post for when I need something that’s safe to put on the internet.

Source. Additional info.

Get those deps.

su -m root -c 'pkg install lighttpd vim'

Let’s make a folder in the home directory with our installation stuff, configs, and master copy of our website data.

mkdir -p ~/website
cd ~/website

Also make a folder for the live version of the website to live in. It will need to be globally readable and executable, but no one needs write permission but the owner. (Question: can the owner be www, as in the config file?)

su -m root -c 'mkdir -p /var/www/servers/documentation/pages/'
self=`whoami`
su -m root -c "chown -R $self:$self /var/www/servers/documentation"
su -m root -c 'chmod -R 755 /var/www/servers/documentation'

Create a config file for lighttpd, then put the following lines in it.

vim ~/website/lighttpd.conf

server.document-root = "/var/www/servers/documentation/pages/" 

server.port = 80

server.username = "www" 
server.groupname = "www" 

mimetype.assign = (
  ".html" => "text/html", 
  ".txt" => "text/plain",
  ".jpg" => "image/jpeg",
  ".png" => "image/png" 
)

static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".fcgi", ".php", ".rb", "~", ".inc" )
index-file.names = ( "index.html" )

Make sure the config doesn’t have errors, then copy it to the system location.

cd ~/website
lighttpd -tt -f lighttpd.conf
su -m root -c 'mkdir -p /etc/lighttpd/ ; cp lighttpd.conf /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/'

Make a simple website:

echo 'hello' > /var/www/servers/documentation/pages/index.html

You can start the server by hand.

cd ~/website/
su
lighttpd -D -f lighttpd.conf
exit

Or enable the daemon that starts the server with the machine.

su
echo 'lighttpd_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
exit

Then reboot, and the server is running. If you don’t want to reboot, start it manually.

su
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/lighttpd start
exit

Notice that we didn’t need to alter the firewal; this is because we made the site available at port 80, which is the default for websites. The only downside is that we have to invoke root to use port 80, and there’s a bit of extra complexity in that config file to change the user back from root to www.