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The available pages I can google about this seem overly complicated. This one documents setting up nginx to run lua scripts on Debian Squeeze. These instructions are derived from http://www.unreliablepollution.net/p/other/howto-nginx-and-lua and a dozen remedial googleings.
  1. aptitude install nginx
    The config in /etc/nginx is good in squeeze. We will need to add the fastcgi handler, but that is to be expected. (I edited it to pull the root up to /var/www instead of in an nginx-default subdirectory.)
  2. aptitude install liblua5.1-wsapi-fcgi-1
    There is also a '0' version, but I took 1 on the theory that newer is better.
  3. aptitude install liblua5.1-coxpcall0
    liblua5.1-wsapi-fcgi-1 probably needs a dependency on this. Things will go poorly for you without it.
  4. aptitude install lua5.1
    Can't forget that.
  5. aptitude install spawn-fcgi
    Older instructions talk about libfastcgi-dev, but it isn't available and I think they just wanted spawn-fcgi out of it anyway.
  6. Put a Lua file in /var/www/hello.lua
    The WSAPI is a little strange. Apparently you don't just print your output, but rather coroutine.yield() it. I used this example program from http://keplerproject.github.com/wsapi/manual.html
    module(..., package.seeall)

    function run(wsapi_env) local headers = { ["Content-type"] = "text/html" }

    local function hello_text() coroutine.yield("<html><body>") coroutine.yield("<p>Hello Wsapi!</p>") coroutine.yield("<p>PATH_INFO: " .. wsapi_env.PATH_INFO .. "</p>") coroutine.yield("<p>SCRIPT_NAME: " .. wsapi_env.SCRIPT_NAME .. "</p>") coroutine.yield("</body></html>") end

    return 200, headers, coroutine.wrap(hello_text) end

  7. spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9100 -F 4 -- /usr/bin/wsapi.fcgi
    Now we have handlers on port 9100. This will need to be in /etc/init.d/blahblahblah but this will do for now.
    Note: spawn-fcgi silently fails if you get the command wrong. Do a "ps" and make sure they are there. You will have a section like this if it succeeds…
    18554 ?        Ss     0:00 lua5.1 /usr/bin/wsapi.fcgi
    18555 ?        Ss     0:00 lua5.1 /usr/bin/wsapi.fcgi
    18556 ?        Ss     0:00 lua5.1 /usr/bin/wsapi.fcgi
    18557 ?        Ss     0:00 lua5.1 /usr/bin/wsapi.fcgi
  8. Edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default to know how we want .lua files handled. I put in this section
    location ~ ^(.+\.lua)(.*)$ {
    root /var/www/; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9100; fastcgi_index index.lua; fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.lua)(.*)$; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; }
    Be careful! Make 'root' match your root!
  9. Restart nginx. /etc/init.d/nginx restart
  10. Load http://YOURSERVER/hello.lua in your browser. You should get something along the lines of:
    Hello Wsapi!

    PATH_INFO: / SCRIPT_NAME: /hello.lua

  11. Celebrate!
Now my thoughts: This may be more than I wanted. I have to think about the implications of a scrutinizer layer above my Lua program. I really wanted to just blast my standard output back up the fastcgi socket. All this yielding seems strange.