So I finally figured out how to get the lighttpd (Lighty) Windows binaries working from a USB Flash Drive. It actually turned out to be easier than I expected. I decided to share it here in case my efforts are of any help to you.
- Download the Windows Binaries. I got them from here. They were produced by the WLMP Project. I chose the .ZIP package without the setup since I wanted to do the installation manually on a USB Drive.
- Extract the LightTPD directory with all of it’s contents from the .ZIP file and copy it to your USB Flash Drive. I put mine in the root folder of my drive.
- Because I was going to use the USB Flash Drive on a computer that already had Apache installed and running on Port 80, I went into the conf folder and edited the lighttpd-inc.conf file. I changed the server.port variable to equal 81 which in my case was just removing the # comment tag from the front of it. Then I saved and closed the file.
- Since I was using Windows Vista (think User Access Control or UAC) I opened a command prompt using the “Run as administrator” right click option. In the command window I navigated to in my case the E:\LightTPD directory and ran the following command.
- The LightTPD.exe showed up in the Process List in the Windows Task Manager.
- I opened up my favorite web browser (Google Chrome in my case) and navigated to http://localhost:81/ and the LightTPD test page was displayed.
- If you encounter a problem with this you may need to add LightTPD.exe to your Windows Fire Wall list of accepted applications in order to make this work correctly.
lighttpd -f conf/lighttpd-srv.conf -m lib -D
That was all it took to get lighttpd up and running from a USB Flash Drive. My next exercise will be to see if I can get PHP and SQLite running from the same drive along with Lighty.
Peace
