Lighttpd and wordpress setup clean SEO friendly URLs

By default WordPress uses web URIs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them; however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URI structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Apache has .htaccess file to setup clean SEO friendly URLs using mod_rewrite module. Similarly. Lighttpd can be use mod_rewrite for writing out clean SEO friendly URLs.

Task: Single wordpress blog (documentroot) and SEO URLS

Let us assume that your blog is hosted at http://theos.in (i.e. no subdirectory) and your want pretty urls.

=> Login to your wordpress admin account

=> Go to Options > PermaLinks

=> Now select URL structure as per your need.
For example Date and name based Permalink Structure should be set as follows (remove the default /index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/):
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

=> Click on Update Permalink structure button to save the changes.

=> Now open your lighttpd configuration file
# vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

=> Locate your virtual hosting configuration for your domain (theos.in) and aftter server.document-root add following line:
server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php?error=404"

At the end your configuration should look as follows:
$SERVER["socket"] == "203.xx.xx.xx:80" {
server.document-root = "/home/lighttpd/theos.in/http"
server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/theos.in/error.log"
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/theos.in/access.log"
server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php?error=404"
}

Save and close the file. Restart lighttpd:
# /etc/init.d/lighttpd

Task: Multiple wordpress blogs single documentroot and SEO URLS

Let us assume that you have multiple blogs hosted under single document root called /home/lighttpd/ as follows:
/home/lighttpd/blog1 (http://theos.in/blog1)
/home/lighttpd/blog2 (http://theos.in/blog1)
...
....
..

First, Login to both blogs and setup Permalink structure as per your requirements. Open /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf file:
# vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Find your domains configuration section and append lines as follows:
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/blog1($|/)" { server.error-handler-404 = "/blog1/index.php?error=404" }
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/blog2($|/)" { server.error-handler-404 = "/blog2/index.php?error=404" }

Save and close the file. Restart lighttpd:
# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

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