One of the more common design patterns in installable web applications today is the Front Controller pattern. Unlike other web applications that have separate files to respond to specific requests, the front controller pattern funnels all requests through a single file, and that file processes the requested URL to respond as appropriate.
In typical scenarios, you’ll accomplish this with Apache using a set of mod_rewrite directives. These directives first check to see if the requested file or directory exists. If it does not exist, then the request is passed on to the front controller. This allows requests for existing files - like images, stylesheets, and client-side scripts - to be requested directly rather than passing through the URL rewriting mechanism.
If you are familiar with implementing a front controller using Apache, you will recognize these directives, which are commonly found in an .htaccess file within the application directory:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [PT]
I have been running a low-budget VPSLink server for a few months. The server is a complete Virtual Private Server (VPS) to which I have root access, and it only costs about $7 per month - less than the price of many less feature-rich shared hosting plans. The downside of such a cheap server is that it only has 64MB of RAM and 2.5GB of drive space to work in. In short, it doesn’t have the requisite resources to run both Apache and MySQL.
As you might be aware, there are other web servers available. A web server of particular interest is Lighttpd, which is a small, fast web server that seems perfect for the needs of this small VPS. Because the disk and memory footprint of Lighttpd is so small, I can run an efficient web server on this tiny VPS without an issue. But one problem’s solution had eluded me until recently, which is how to enable the front controller on Lighttpd.
Lighttpd does not use the same directives as Apache. Instead, they have a completely different mechanism for configuring the server. After much research, trial, and error, I think I have come across a combination of directives that result in a working front controller.
First, the configuration must enable the mod_rewrite module. This is named the same as the Apache module, but is different for the Lighttpd server. Add this module to the server.modules list:
server.modules = (
“mod_access”,
“mod_alias”,
“mod_accesslog”,
“mod_fastcgi”,
“mod_rewrite”
)
With that module enabled, you can set rewrite rules that enable the front controller. The tricky part to solving this is to also allow requests to files that exist to pass through the rewrite so that they are not rewritten. I believe that the following rules will successfully accomplish this task:
url.rewrite-once = (
“^/(.).(.)” => “$0”,
“^/([^.]+)$” => “/index.php”,
“^/$” => “/index.php”
)
In concert with these Lighty rules, I have configured the server to use SQLite instead of MySQL. (There simply isn’t enough memory to run MySQL on this small server, even with the web server completely disabled) Using Lighttpd and SQLite on the server allows me to run a Habari instance on this super-small, custom-configured server for about $7/month. When using Habari with the Flickr silo plugin, I can host the bulk of my photo resources at Flickr where the bandwidth and storage space are plentiful, leaving me with a clean, fully-featured server.
Running a tight server where the server itself was running only the necessary services and a content delivery network was hosting the bulk of my content has been a goal of mine for quite some time. Prior to these configuration options, I had been able to do this only on more expensive VPSes or flaky shared hosting. With this configuration, I can have the best of both worlds - a cheap and full-featured blog server.
