Lighttpd

Nice! Thank you for doing that. I'll take a closer read later this evening.

> SSL/TTS is strongly recommended in all cases
      ~~~

I've been reviewing the documentation on this site, too, so if you have any feedback about the info at https://wiki.lighttpd.net/ that is appreciated, too. There is a lot of doc to review on this site, so if you have a favorite page or two which could use some polishing, please suggest it here.

The Docs_Performance page was recently updated, and the debian page points to a no-longer existing page Docs_MultiProcessor. Instead, please see server.max-worker

The Debian wiki text copies some older text from this site, and the older text has been removed.

"This is not recommended as it breaks several important features, most notably the access log. Nonetheless, it's documented on the Lighttpd wiki: https://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/wiki/Docs_MultiProcessor"

That is no longer accurate. The access log works, even with multiple workers. Multiple workers do not "break several important features", though there are limitations that are documented in server.max-worker

I am not convinced that the "MIME types" section in https://wiki.debian.org/Lighttpd should be there at all. Most people, especially beginners, should not change these settings, as the defaults work well for most uses. Therefore, the "MIME types" section presence on the page adds more confusion for beginners, and does not add value to the page. Just my opinion.

In the Configuration section
# lighttpd -t -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
Please prefer -tt, as it performs additional pre-flight checks on the configuration:
# lighttpd -tt -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

You can also point this command to any of the files in your /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/ folder if you want to verify them.

I do not understand what you mean by this.

The review so far is much appreciated, I've adopted your suggestions into your page. I intend to type up a larger reply soon, but I wanted to quickly address:

I do not understand what you mean by this.

It's reasonable to also check any of the configuration files in /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/, if you've edited them, to ensure they have valid syntax as well. Is that correct? Would there be a more clear way to word this?

# lighttpd -t -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf will perform a minimal syntax-check to confirm that it is parseable by the parser, but does not validate any of the directives. Yes, you could specify lighttpd -t -f /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/xxxxx.conf

However, if you specified with -tt (e.g. lighttpd -tt -f /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/xxxxx.conf) then lighttpd would fail saying the server.document-root is missing since -tt not only parses the config but also performs validation.
You and I know this, but a beginner might not: changes made to /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/*.conf are not used by lighttpd.conf unless also enabled (lighty-enable-mod).

# lighttpd -tt -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf is more thorough than the minimal syntax-check of -t.
-tt is much more useful to the average person trying to find out why lighttpd might not load after changes were made to the configuration.

Aha, I understand. You're saying that when using the -tt flag, it would be redundant to check any of the specific configuration files for the modules you've enabled, because if they are loaded and enabled, they would already be checked as part of validation. Okay, I'll remove this line from the article.

I apologize for my inexperience in some respects, I'm still fairly new to Lighttpd myself.

No need to apologize. I'm thrilled that you bring a fresh perspective and are helping to improve the documentation.

A minimal lighttpd configuration is
server.document-root = "/srv/www"
That's it. (There is some unfortunately necessary complexity with setting up and managing TLS.)

I think that Debian and most other distros make things waaaaaaaay more complicated than needed for beginners.