Installing Lighttpd with Mono support

Below are the steps I used to get mono and lighttpd installed on my Ubuntu 10.104 LTS node from linode.com.

First I installed lighttpd using aptitude:

user@li35-84:~$ sudo aptitude install lighttpd

Next I needed support for .Net 2.0

user@li35-84:~$ sudo aptitude install mono-fastcgi-server

Then I created the file /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/15-mono.conf and added the following text using VI

#Mono Stuff
# Add index.aspx and default.aspx to the list of files to check when a
# directory is requested.
index-file.names += (
        "index.aspx",
        "default.aspx"
)


### The directory that contains your Mono installation.
# The "bin" subdir will be added to the PATH and the "lib" subdir will be
# added to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
# For a typical system-wide installation on Linux, use:
var.mono_dir = "/usr/"
# For an installation in a user account (lighttpd need read/exec access):
#var.mono_dir = "/home/username/mono-1.2.6/"

### A directory that is writable by the lighttpd process.
# This is where the log file, communication socket, and Mono's .wapi folder
# will be created.
# For a typical system-wide installation on Linux, use:
var.mono_shared_dir = "/tmp/"
# For an installation in a user account (dir must exist and be writable):
#var.mono_shared_dir = "/home/username/lighttpd_scratch/"

### The path to the server to launch to handle FASTCGI requests.
# For ASP.NET 1.1 support use:
#var.mono_fastcgi_server = mono_dir + "bin/" + "fastcgi-mono-server"
# For ASP.NET 2.0 support use:
var.mono_fastcgi_server = mono_dir + "bin/" + "fastcgi-mono-server2"

### The root of your applications
# For apps installed under the lighttpd document root, use:
var.mono_fcgi_root = server.document-root
# For apps installed in a user account, use something like:
#var.mono_fcgi_root = "/home/username/htdocs/"

### Application map
# A comma separated list of virtual directory and real directory
# for all the applications we want to manage with this server. The
# virtual and real dirs. are separated by  a  colon.
var.mono_fcgi_applications = "/:."

Once the mono settings were created I created a file (25-domain.com.conf) for the virtually hosted domain enabeling mono.

        server.modules   += ( "mod_fastcgi" )

        $HTTP["host"] =~ "domain\.com$" {
        server.document-root = "/var/sites/domain.com"
        server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/domain.com/error.log"
        accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/domain.com/access.log"
        fastcgi.server  = (
                ".aspx" => ((
                        "socket" => mono_shared_dir + "fastcgi-mono-server-domain",
                        "bin-path" => mono_fastcgi_server,
                        "bin-environment" => (
                                "PATH" => "/bin:/usr/bin:" + mono_dir + "bin",
                                "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" => mono_dir + "lib:",
                                "MONO_SHARED_DIR" => mono_shared_dir,
                                "MONO_FCGI_LOGLEVELS" => "Standard",
                                "MONO_FCGI_LOGFILE" => mono_shared_dir + "fastcgi.log",
                                "MONO_FCGI_ROOT" => "/var/sites/domain.com",
                                "MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS" => "/:/var/sites/domain.com"
                        ),
                        "max-procs" => 1,
                        "check-local" => "disable"
                ))
        )
        fastcgi.map-extensions = (
                ".asmx"   => ".aspx",
                ".ashx"   => ".aspx",
                ".asax"   => ".aspx",
                ".ascx"   => ".aspx",
                ".soap"   => ".aspx",
                ".rem"    => ".aspx",
                ".axd"    => ".aspx",
                ".cs"     => ".aspx",
                ".config" => ".aspx",
                ".dll"    => ".aspx"
        )
}

I had read quite a bit of documentation telling me that I should not map a particular extension and or use the fastcgi.max-extensions and just process everything but I found that doing so prevented web services (axd) files from processing. Next it was time to enable the config changes in lighttpd by linking the files into the conf-enabled folder.

user@li35-84:~$ sudo ln /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/15-mono.conf /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/
user@li35-84:~$ sudo ln /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/25-domain.com.conf /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/

At this point it was necessary to create the directories where logs would be stored.

user@li35-84:~$ sudo mkdir /var/log/lighttpd/domain.com
user@li35-84:~$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/log/lighttpd/domain.com

Then create the directory were the website files will be stored

user@li35-84:~$ sudo mkdir /var/sites/
user@li35-84:~$ sudo mkdir /var/sites/domain.com

Last restart lighttpd

user@li35-84:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

There ya go now you have a server capable of running Mono compatable applications like this blog.