This was performed on Archlinux with lighttpd 1.4.28 and rails 3.0.3

Prerequisites

Required packages:

• lighttpd,
• fcgi,
• ruby,
• and their dependencies…

Ruby Setup

Required gems:

• fcgi,
• bundler

(if you are behind a proxy, the magic gem command is :

# gem install GEM -r -p "http://[PROXY_URL]:[PROXY_PORT]"

)

Once you have that you need to create a “dispatch.fcgi” script to do all the rails magic. I found an example one at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3296206/rails-3-and-fcgi .

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'require 'fcgi'

require_relative '../config/environment'

class Rack::PathInfoRewriter  

  def initialize(app)    
    @app = app  
  end

  def call(env)    
    env.delete('SCRIPT_NAME')    
    parts = env['REQUEST_URI'].split('?')    
    env['PATH_INFO'] = parts[0]    
    env['QUERY_STRING'] = parts[1].to_s    
    @app.call(env)  
  end
end

Rack::Handler::FastCGI.run  Rack::PathInfoRewriter.new(YOUR_APP_NAME::Application)

Running a “bundle install” from your app root will make sure all the necessary gems are available for local use. Follow these instructions and run “ruby public/dispatch.fcgi”, if you get no errors, voila!

Lighttpd Setup

Now, to set up lighttpd you need to merge this with your config:

server.modules   += ( "mod_fastcgi", "mod_rewrite" )

$HTTP["host"] == "localhost" {        

  server.document-root       =   "/path/to/your/app/public/"

  server.dir-listing         =   "disable"        
  server.error-handler-404   =   "/dispatch.fcgi"

  fastcgi.server             =   ( 
                                   ".fcgi" => ( 
                                     "localhost" => (
                                       "min-procs" => 1,
                                       "max-procs" => 1,
                                       "socket" => "/tmp/ruby-beholder.socket",                
                                       "bin-path" => "/path/to/your/app/public/dispatch.fcgi",                
                                       "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "development" )        
                                       ) 
                                     ) 
                                   )
}

A quick “sudo /etc/rc.d/lighttpd restart” and a check of the error logs will tell you if it has worked