Lighttpd and mod_expire

Google Page Speed Online is really good service for measuring and optimising your website. After deep analysis we get a lot if clues how to improve speed of your website. But how to Leverage browser caching if we have Lighttpd  instead default Apache? We need to use mod_expire .

All you need to do is decide which type of files you wan to cache “longer”. For example for images, CSS and JavaScript files you can use this code in you lighttpd config file

/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf:

$HTTP["url"] =~ "\.(jpg|gif|png|css|js)$" {
    expire.url = ( "" => "access 7 days" )
}

don’t forget to restart lighttpd: service lighttpd restart after that, you can check how this is actually working using curl:

curl -I http://www.spidersoft.com.au/wp-content/themes/itheme2/style.css

you should get something like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Expires: Fri, 25 Sep 2011 05:52:26 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=604800, max-age=604800
Content-Type: text/css
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "646531796"
Last-Modified: Wed, 18 May 2011 13:54:40 GMT
Content-Length: 30943
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 05:52:26 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.28

don’t forget to enable etags!

etag.use-inode = "enable"
etag.use-mtime = "enable"
etag.use-size = "enable"
static-file.etags = "enable"