Lighttpd after version 1.4.9 requires the full path in the “bin-path” part of the lighttpd.conf file. Also from version 1.4.10 you will have CWD in your config files:

"bin-path" => CWD + "/public/dispatch.fcgi"

So if you have old lighttpd (<=1.4.8) and old rails applications (<=1.1.0) you can have a problems (with existing or just created applications):

• upgrading only the lighttpd, but not the rails (solution: convert relative paths to the absolute ones)
• upgrading only the rails, but not the lighttpd (CWD keyword support is missing in the old lighty versions, solution: remove CMD+ part from the path).

The best solution is maybe:

• convert all paths to absolute ones for the existing applications
• upgrade lighttpd to the latest version (1.4.11 in the moment)
• “freeze” the existing applications (put in /vendor/rails/ the correct rails version files)
• upgrade the rails (no need to do anything when generate new projects)

In the latest lighttpd-1.4.8 release, they removed the debian/ support (from the changelog):
removed debian/ dir from source package on request by packager

Sad For me i solved the problem with copying the directory from the old 1.4.7 release and fixing the changelog file. If you need better support, use bougyman’s repository. In your debian or ubuntu /etc/apt/sources.list add:

deb http://debian.bougyman.com/ unstable main

Bougyman is a very interesting person. He is working for some US goverment organization and supporting a huge Ruby On Rails system (something like a paperless office) – PostgreSQL, linux virtual server powered FastCGI listeners etc. I learned a lot from him about using RoR in production environments. Thanks. Recently I found his typo blog – All-Purpose Log for Rubyists , full with useful information. Just to mention:

• Rails-Editor gem — pure man Locomotive for Linux producing screen based console IDE
• spawn-fcgi in the foreground!—we are using that approach too to start/stop dispatch.fcgi listeners independently from the frontend web server (lighttpd)

From the Lighttpd blog
:

lighttpd 1.4.8 was just released and next to a pile of bugfixes we added a new option to fastcgi.server to allow a simple setup of multiple rails app in one virtual host…the new option strip-request-uri removes parts of the request-uri before they are sent to the backend:

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/app1/" {
  server.document-root = "/home/rails/app1/public/"
  alias.url = ( "/app1/" => "/home/rails/app1/public/" )
  server.error-handler-404 = "/app1/dispatch.fcgi"
  fastcgi.server = ( "/app1/dispatch.fcgi" =>
    (( "socket" => "/tmp/app1.socket1",
       "bin-path" =>  "/home/rails/app1/public/dispatch.fcgi",
       "strip-request-uri" => "/app1/"
  )))
}

Maybe you can have the same effect with adding to config/environment.rb the line:

ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = "/app1"

In case of lighttpd, runing on high port, behign an apache proxy (similar to TextDrive), just add to apache.conf:

ProxyPass /app1 http://app1.example.net:8080
ProxyPassReverse /app1 http://app1.example.net:8080