lighttpd

A lightweight, fast web server.

lighttpd is a small-footprint web server designed for high throughput on commodity hardware. It supports FastCGI, SCGI, WebSocket proxying, virtual hosts, and TLS termination, and is often chosen for embedded systems, shared-hosting setups, and microservices where memory and CPU are tight.

Jan Kneschke wrote the first version in 2003. The server has gone through multiple major releases (1.4 in long-term maintenance, 1.5 abandoned, then a mainline 1.4.x continuation that has continued steadily). The codebase is small and auditable, which has kept lighttpd's footprint advantage intact relative to Apache and NGINX.

lighttpd's market share is well behind NGINX and Apache for public-internet sites, but it remains common in embedded device firmware (routers, IoT controllers) and in shared-hosting control panels (cPanel, DirectAdmin) that need to serve many small sites with low overhead.

License: BSD-3-Clause

Category: Networking

Website: https://www.lighttpd.net/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install lighttpd
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install lighttpd
Arch:          sudo pacman -S lighttpd

Authors

Jan Kneschke (creator)
lighttpd team

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