Setting up Nagios Web Interface with Lighty¶

Nagios is a system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better. Nagios has a web interface that allows you to check and modify configuration via the web. There's a documentation that explains how to set up Nagios with Apache. http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/installweb.html

This assumes that Nagios is installed in /usr/local/nagios.

Edit lighttpd.conf and unhash "mod_alias", "mod_auth", "mod_setenv" and "mod_cgi" in the server.modules section.

Then add the following:

alias.url =     (
                "/nagios/cgi-bin" => "/usr/local/nagios/sbin",
                "/nagios" => "/usr/local/nagios/share" 
                )

Nagios comes with CGI scripts that are compiled binaries. We need to make sure that Lighty doesn't try to run them thru Perl.

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

In order to see and modify the configuration you need to set up CGI authentication. The general steps to enable CGI authentication would be creating your /etc/nagios/passwd file and adding the following lines to your lighttpd.conf:

$HTTP["url"] =~ "nagios" {
        auth.backend = "htpasswd" 
        auth.backend.htpasswd.userfile = "/etc/nagios/passwd" 
        auth.require = ( "" => (
                "method" => "basic",
                "realm" => "nagios",
                "require" => "user=nagiosadmin" 
                )
        )
        setenv.add-environment = ( "REMOTE_USER" => "user" )
}

CGI programs for Nagios require a REMOTE_USER environmental variable which is provided by Apache, with here we are emulating it with mod_setenv. More information about CGI authentication may be found here: http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/configcgi.html

Once you restart lighttpd, you should be able to access Nagios interface at http://your_host/nagios