Somebody wrote an excellent post on how to make CakePHP work on LigHTTPD. It didn't work for me right away because for some reason mod_rewrite or my CakePHP settings are different from the "default" behavior.

Most blogs say that their URL arguments for non-tidy URLs are like this: /cakedir/index.php?url=pagename. However, for some reason my URLs are like this: /cakedir/index.php/pagename. I'm not sure why that is.

Nevertheless, you can follow the instructions in the blog post but if you have the same URL path rewrite setup as I do you will need to make a critical change to the url.rewrite-once statement:

#this is the original
   url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/$1/$2",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php?url=$1"
   )

#change the index.php part
   url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/$1/$2",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php/$1"
   )

Enabling CakePHP 1.1 on Lighttpd 1.5

I was having trouble getting PHP 5 fastcgi to work with lighttpd on my Mac OS X 10.4 laptop. The core of the problem is that the default port install of php5 on the mac does not include CGI support.

The command you are looking for is

sudo port install php5 +fastcgi

#use this command to see what options are available
port variants php5

I believe this is the Mac equivalent to ubuntu's command

sudo apt-get install php5-cgi

PHP 5 and LightTPD on Mac OS X

I've been having a lot of trouble figuring out how to configure general mac startup services. I've also had tons of trouble figuring out how to configure lighttpd.conf files. I came across this TextSnippets website that seems to have a lot of good examples for configuring all this crazy server and OS X related stuff.

Lighttpd launchd item for OS X 10.4

This is a handy resource for setting up your LigHTTPD virtual hosts by hand. Nothing fancy here, I just can never remember how to do it without referring to this page.

Link

Some instructions on how to use simple virtual hosts on LigHTTPD. I haven't tried this yet but I'm sure sick of tinkering with my lighhtpd.conf file.

Link