Armbian Webserver - monkeymia/orangepizero GitHub Wiki

Webserver

Installation

A web-server can be installed with:

sudo apt install lighttpd

This package installs:

  • application (daemon): /usr/sbin/lighttpd
  • software to control (graceful stop/restart/...) the daemon /usr/sbin/lighttpd-angel
  • configuration * /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf * /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/ * /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/
  • new user "www-data"
  • new group "www-data"
  • placeholder page :
    • You should replace this page with your own web pages as soon as possible.
    • Unless you changed its configuration, your new server is configured as follows:
    • Configuration files can be found in /etc/lighttpd. Please read /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/README file.
    • The DocumentRoot, which is the directory under which all your HTML files should exist, is set to /var/www/html.
    • CGI scripts are looked for in /usr/www/cgi-bin, which is where Ubuntu packages will place their scripts. You can enable cgi module by using command "lighty-enable-mod cgi".
    • Log files are placed in /var/log/lighttpd, and will be rotated weekly. The frequency of rotation can be easily changed by editing /etc/logrotate.d/lighttpd.
    • The default directory index is index.html, meaning that requests for a directory /foo/bar/ will give the contents of the file /var/www/foo/bar/index.html if it exists (assuming that /var/www is your DocumentRoot). You can enable user directories by using command "lighty-enable-mod userdir"

After installation the webserver is already running.

Enable Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

The web-server calls a sub-process to process the request. The sub-process does the dynamic creation of the content to be returned.

Steps :

  1. Enable cgi module within web-server :
demonstrator@orangepizero:~$ sudo lighty-enable-mod cgi
[sudo] password for demonstrator:
Enabling cgi: ok
Run "service lighttpd force-reload" to enable changes
demonstrator@orangepizero:~$ sudo service lighttpd force-reload
demonstrator@orangepizero:~$

This creates /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi.conf

  1. Configure files with extension ".py" and ".cgi" non-static files :

    sudo nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi", ".cgi", ".py" )

  2. map file extension and application

    sudo nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/cgi-bin/" {
   cgi.assign = ( "" => "" )
}

=>

alias.url += ( "/cgi-bin" => "/var/www/cgi-bin" )
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/cgi-bin/" {
 cgi.assign = ( ".py"  => "/usr/bin/python3",
                ".cgi" => "/bin/sh",
 )
}

  3. write a cgi script in

    sudo touch /var/www/cgi-bin/welcome.cgi
sudo nano  /var/www/cgi-bin/welcome.cgi

    echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo ""
echo '<HTML>'
echo '<BODY>'
echo '<H1>This is my first CGI script</H1>'
echo 'Hello, world!'
echo '<h2>Environment Variables:</h2>'
echo '<pre>'
/usr/bin/env
echo '</pre>'
echo '</BODY>'
echo '</HTML>'
exit 0

  4. Add correct file permission; scripts must be executable:

    sudo chmod +x welcome.cgi
sudo chown -R www-data
sudo chgrp -R www-data

  5. restart webserver

    sudo service lighttpd force-reload

  6. write a python based cgi script and test it :

    sudo touch /var/www/cgi-bin/welcome.py
sudo nano  /var/www/cgi-bin/welcome.py

    print "Content-Type: text/html"
print ""
print "<body>"
print "TEST"
print "</body>"

    sudo service lighttpd force-reload

  7. open web-browser and surf

    http://192.168.2.240/cgi-bin/welcome.cgi

    returns something like

    Environment Variables:
GATEWAY_INTERFACE=CGI/1.1
REMOTE_ADDR=192.168.2.42
QUERY_STRING=
DOCUMENT_ROOT=/var/www/cgi-bin
REMOTE_PORT=53415
HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.62 Safari/537.36
HTTP_UPGRADE_INSECURE_REQUESTS=1
HTTP_ACCEPT=text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8
CONTENT_LENGTH=0
SCRIPT_FILENAME=/var/www/cgi-bin/welcome.cgi
HTTP_HOST=192.168.2.240
REQUEST_URI=/cgi-bin/welcome.cgi
SERVER_SOFTWARE=lighttpd/1.4.45
HTTP_CONNECTION=keep-alive
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE=en-US,en;q=0.9
SERVER_PROTOCOL=HTTP/1.1
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING=gzip, deflate
REDIRECT_STATUS=200
REQUEST_METHOD=GET
SERVER_ADDR=192.168.2.240
PWD=/var/www/cgi-bin
SERVER_PORT=80
SCRIPT_NAME=/cgi-bin/welcome.cgi
SERVER_NAME=192.168.2.240

  8. open web-browser and surf

    http://192.168.2.240/cgi-bin/welcome.py

    returns something like

    TEST

Troubleshooting

  • Check file permission (executable)
  • check linux line endings
  • check shebang line
  • check the empty line after Content-type
  • call script on target
  • double-check spaces and correct syntax in configuration

Enable Fast Common Gateway Interface (FastCGI)

The FastCGI Interface is defined by http://www.fastcgi.com/ and is a platform-independent and server-independent interface between a web-application and a webserver.

The web-server keeps the sub-process running. This removes time to fork/stop/restart.

Steps :

  1. Enable fast cgi module within web-server :

    demonstrator@orangepizero:/etc/lighttpd$ sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi
Enabling fastcgi: ok
Run "service lighttpd force-reload" to enable changes
demonstrator@orangepizero:/etc/lighttpd$ service lighttpd force-reload
==== AUTHENTICATING FOR org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units ===
Authentication is required to restart 'lighttpd.service'.
Authenticating as: ,,, (demonstrator)
Password:
==== AUTHENTICATION COMPLETE ===

This creates /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-fastcgi.conf

  1. Install python fast cgi server (flup)

    sudo apt install python3-pip
sudo pip3 install flup-py3 -t /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/

    Note: If target is not specified, then pip installs into $HOME

  2. put example from https://docs.python.org/3.1/howto/webservers.html

    sudo mkdir -p /var/www/fcgi-bin/
sudo touch /var/www/fcgi-bin/welcome.fcgi
sudo nano  /var/www/fcgi-bin/welcome.fcgi

    #!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
import html
import flup.server.fcgi
import os
import sys
def app (environ, start_response) :
    start_response ('200 OK', [('Content-Type', 'text/html')])
    yield '<h1>FastCGI Environment</h1>'
    yield '<table>'
    for k, v in sorted(environ.items()):
         yield '<tr><th>{0}</th><td>{1}</td></tr>'.format(
             html.escape(str (k)), html.escape(str (v)))
    yield '</table>'
#end def
flup.server.fcgi.WSGIServer(app).run()

  3. edit /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-fastcgi.conf

    server.modules += ( "mod_fastcgi" )
fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
    (
        "python-fcgi" =>
        (
            "socket" => "/tmp/fastcgi.python.socket",
            "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/python3 /var/www/fcgi-bin/welcome.fcgi",
            "check-local" => "disable",
            "max-procs" => 1,
            "bin-copy-environment" => (
                "PATH", "SHELL", "USER", "PYTHONPATH"
            ),
        )
    )
)

  1. test in web-browser

    http://192.168.2.240/foo.fcgi

    returns something like

    CONTENT_LENGTH      0
DOCUMENT_ROOT       /var/www/html
GATEWAY_INTERFACE   CGI/1.1
HTTP_ACCEPT text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING        gzip, deflate
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE        en-US,en;q=0.9
HTTP_CONNECTION     keep-alive
HTTP_HOST   192.168.2.240
HTTP_UPGRADE_INSECURE_REQUESTS      1
HTTP_USER_AGENT     Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.62 Safari/537.36
PATH_INFO
QUERY_STRING
REDIRECT_STATUS     200
REMOTE_ADDR 192.168.2.42
REMOTE_PORT 58236
REQUEST_METHOD      GET
REQUEST_URI /foo.fcgi
SCRIPT_FILENAME     /var/www/html/foo.fcgi
SCRIPT_NAME /foo.fcgi
SERVER_ADDR 192.168.2.240
SERVER_NAME 192.168.2.240
SERVER_PORT 80
SERVER_PROTOCOL     HTTP/1.1
SERVER_SOFTWARE     lighttpd/1.4.45
wsgi.errors <flup.server.fcgi_base.OutputStream object at 0xb6ab43d0>
wsgi.input  <flup.server.fcgi_base.InputStream object at 0xb6ab4390>
wsgi.multiprocess   False
wsgi.multithread    True
wsgi.run_once       False
wsgi.url_scheme     http
wsgi.version        (1, 0)

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