Configuring the Lighttpd web server

Preliminaries

Gain access to Linux on your device.
Setup the Optware Feed.
Open the root file system to read/write with rootfs_open.

Edit

Although this tutorial still works. It appears that Sprint has blocked http traffic over the external ip address on ppp0.[can someone confirm?] The tutorial still applies if you are accessing lighttpd using Wifi or USBnet.

Install Lighttpd with PHP support

ipkg-opt install lighttpd php-fcgi

Tweak settings

vi /opt/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

If you are going to run static HTML pages, there is no need to do this. If you want the ability to run PHP pages then this line must be uncommented:

                                "mod_fastcgi",

You may also want to adjust the port that the web server runs on. Sprint blocks port 80 and this package installs Lighttpd to run on port 8081 :

## bind to port (default: 80)
server.port                = 8081

Start the web server:

/opt/etc/init.d/S80lighttpd start

Add a startup script

I placed a file at /etc/event.d/optware-lighttpd so that the web server starts up after each reboot and the iptables firewall rules are executed to allow access to port 8080:

# don't start until the WebOS finishes it's normal boot
# that way no delay is added to the GUI startup
start on stopped finish
stop on runlevel [!2]

# Restart the lighttpd daemon if it exits/dies
respawn

exec /opt/sbin/lighttpd -f /opt/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

pre-start script
        /usr/sbin/iptables -D INPUT -p tcp --dport 8081 -j ACCEPT || /bin/true
        /usr/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 8081 -j ACCEPT
end script

Reboot the phone so that the firewall rules are executed:

/sbin/reboot

Add files to the web directory:

The default home directory lives at:

/opt/share/www/

Sample gps.php file that will load your current location via Google maps:

<?php
$gps = `luna-send -n 1 palm://com.palm.location/getCurrentPosition {} 2>&1 | cut -d, -f4,5 | sed -r 's/[^-\.0-9,]//g'`;
?>
<html>
<iframe width="600" height="500" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&q=<?php echo $gps ?>&z=16&ll=<?php echo $gps ?>&output=embed"></iframe><br /><small><a href="http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&q=<?php echo $gps ?>&z=16&ll=<?php echo $gps ?>&source=embed" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map</a></small>
</html>

Other Considerations

Dynamic DNS

Install the ez-ipupdate package
Configure ez-ipupdate to update a DDNS service any time the EVDO IP changes
CNAME record of primary domain - I have a CNAME record pointed to my DDNS record so that I always have the most up-to-date IP of my phone

Log files

Need to keep an eye on the /opt/var/log/lighttpd/ log files and make sure they are rotated consistently

Lighttpd

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