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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It was really surprising to see that the only necessary step to take was to address the 404, definitely much easier than Apache
Thank you for the tip.
Indeed amazingly simple!
I spent an hour or more on multiple line configs while this was all that was needed… Thanks!
Please make sure you have 404.php in template directory to send 404 stats when you got actual error 404.