Lighttpd 1.5 rewrite rules for WordPress
GreatWebGuy.com is now running on Lighttpd or “Lighty” 1.5 and WordPress 2.2. The biggest hurdle we had to overcome running our blog with the Lighty http server was the rewrite rules for our custom Permalink structure - /%category%/%postname%/ - none of the rewrite rules posted on the web seemed to work correctly. If you get the rules right, you should be able to accomplish the pretty urls that you want with 5 or fewer rewrite rules, I’ve seen some examples on the web with as few as 4 and as many as 30. We also ran into problems with the version numbers included in the querystring of the internal javascript urls in WordPress, it turned out they were being rewritten unintentionally.
These may work or not for your setup, a couple of things to note when writing rewrite rules:
- Start your rule set with areas you know need to be excluded, not rewritten, and write rules that result in => “$0″
- Work your way from specific rules to more generic and all encompassing rules
- Attempt to break the rules down into as few rules as possible, realize rule interpretation causes load on the http server
- Use rewrite-once so that Lighty will stop processing rules when it’s found a match
url.rewrite-once = ( "^/(wp-.+).*/?" => "$0", "^/(sitemap.xml)" => "$0", "^/(xmlrpc.php)" => "$0", "^/keyword/([A-Za-z_0-9\-]+)/?$" => "/index.php?keyword=$1", "^/.*?(\?.*)?$" => "/index.php$1" )
Sep 29th, 2007 at 6:30 am
Thanks, the rules works (with some small changes) on lighttpd 1.4.x but i cant’t post comments on my form. I think this is some permalink-issue. Can you help me?
Aug 14th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Yeah, working perfectly. Thanks!
Aug 14th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Glad to hear it, I was beginning to think nobody else was running lighttpd, but me.
Sep 10th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
cool~~it works well~~thx
Sep 10th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
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Sep 15th, 2008 at 5:39 am
The way I use lighttpd with WordPress’ permalinks is simply set server.error-handler-404 to WP’s index.php file — this is on 1.4, by the way.
Sep 24th, 2008 at 5:12 am
well i cant make it on lighty with the rewrite rule you wrote here
Sep 24th, 2008 at 6:10 am
@mwunm sorry to hear that, these are specific to lighty 1.5 and will only work with the permalink structure that I’ve chosen to use,/%category%/%postname%/. I’m now on WordPress 2.6.2 and the rules are still working great. Hope you find a solution that works for you.