Installation

First, of course, I installed the git port:

portmaster devel/git

I made sure to select the gitweb option, which is de-activated by default. The other options are up to you.

Configuration

Second, I configured Lighttpd in the simplest manner I could find. This solution uses the existing gitweb files in-place. This is contrary to what the pkg-message prescribes, but I like this idea because it’ll ensure that upgrades are handled automatically. I don’t plan to run any additional repositories either, so using the one central set of files is preferable in my situation. This is my configuration:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "^origami.zelut.org" {
$HTTP["url"] =~ "/gitweb/" {
server.indexfiles = ( "gitweb.cgi" )
}
alias.url += ( "/gitweb/" => "/usr/local/share/examples/git/gitweb/" ),
cgi.assign = ( ".cgi" => "/usr/bin/perl" )
}


Repository Configuration

Lastly, I update the repository configuration in /usr/local/share/examples/git/gitweb/gitweb.cgi to my repository location:

our $projectroot = "/path/to/git/repository/"

Conclusion

I find that Lighttpd configuration, once you get used to it, is much simpler than Apache configuration. It’s all a matter of taking the time to learn the options (and finding examples, like this one) and it gets simpler.

I think this configuration for gitweb is very clean, requires minimal configuration additions, and is hopefully pretty self explanatory. I hope it works for you as well.

Problem

The web server seemed to work great. It was handling traffic efficiently. Logs were going where they were expected. Rewrites were working. All the main things that I would expect to test were working just fine. And then I uploaded a file.

Hard lock. Panic. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. This was bad.

I was even able to reproduce it. Anytime I would upload a file to the server (in my case via WordPress upload form), the server would hard-lock and I’d have to manually bring it back up.

Solution

The solution was to manually define the server.network-backend value, instead of using the auto-detected value. Apparently, at the time of this writing, the auto-detection on FreeBSD is.. less than perfect. The solution that I found was to add the following line to my lighttpd.conf:

server.network-backend = "writev"

After restarting the lighttpd service things seemed to perform as expected.

Conclusion

FreeBSD is a great, stable hosting platform. Lighttpd is a lightweight, efficient web server. Together they provide me with a very efficient, stable web hosting environment. The simple detail is to define the right parameters for the platform in the configuration.


$HTTP["host"] =~ "domain.tld" {
auth.require = (
"/secret/" => (
"method"    => "basic",
"realm"     => "Password Protected Area",
"require"   => "valid-user",
),
"/private/" => (
"method"    => "basic",
"realm"     => "Password Protected Area",
"require"   => "valid-user",
)
)
}

The cause of my problem was the missing comma between the directory names. If you’re going to limit access to multiple directories in a list like this it needs to be a comma separated list.