Massive update: per user Lighttpd + nginx

Massive software update!

We did quite a massive software update for the end of March. This was an extremely rapid development cycle, from initial proof of concept to production quality in just 26-27 hours.
This update has been taken into a bunch of production servers already, and it’s a traditional slow rollout. In some cases, the update process can take hours to complete if the software on the target server is more than 1½ months old.

So what did we do?

We changed the whole structure underneath for the web access portion. We now run a single nginx process globablly which does reverse proxy for per user, userland lighttpd. The initial proof of concept was surprisingly easy to do, but all the management, tightening security, testing and retesting, conversion etc. was a big job!

So how does this benefit You?

First of all and foremost, tighter security and user isolation. This gives more control over permissions, which increases security. More granular resource control as well.
Next up is performance, which came as a byproduct of individual processes and nginx reverse proxying – despite we did not particularly enable caching (yet) some things simply get stored in RAM more efficiently. In otherwords, the GUI works more swiftly.

Bug fixing! Several bugs got fixed on the filemanager at the go. Most of it’s features now work flawlessly. Compression doesn’t work yet, but it’s coming on next update!

New capabilities too! Every user now has a public html directory they can load stuff into, to access just change your url from user-john to public-john, for example if your access url to GUI is:
http://server42.pulsedmedia.com/user-john/
To access public directory you use URL:
http://server42.pulsedmedia.com/public-john/
This allows you to host direct download files etc. PHP is supported as well, so in theory you could run even a blog or something in there!

This opens the door for some nice future features as well. Would you like webhosting service as well with your seedbox? That’s now possible! You could host your blog, or a simple file upload script for your friends to share in the same space!

One important change is that you can now change your web access password, or even create new ones, without opening a ticket. Just use the htpasswd command, ie. htpasswd .lighttpd/.htpasswd john

So many updates!

So many updates on the code base has happened in the past couple of months! Now this, along with the introduction of BTSync, pyLoad, Megatools, Sabnzbdplus, Sonarr/NZBDrone! You can also check the whole changelog in our wiki. What’s next? What would you like to see next?