How to configure the webserver to server a particular page as the default page?

Question

I am using Lighttpd and Django. I have configured my Lighttpd server to pass all the requests ending with ".psp" extension to Django.

My startup page is a page served through Django, which is accessed as "http://192.168.1.198/home.psp". I want to enable the user to browse this page without writing "home.psp" explicitly in the url i.e. using "http://192.168.1.198"

Is this possible?

Thanks for any help in advance.

Answer 1

I solved the problem myself. Here is what I did:

I had to add a statement inside url.rewrite-once block of lighttpd's configuration file like:

 url.rewrite-once = (
        "^(/media.*)$" => "$1",
        "^(/static.*)$" => "$1",
        "^/favicon\.ico$" => "/media/favicon.ico",
        "^(/)$" => "/my_project_dir/home.psp",
        "^(/.*)$" => "/my_project_dir$1",
   )

Apart from this, I added the following line in my urls.py:

(r'^$',my_index_view_name),

Hope this helps someone in the future. Thanks everybody for your replies above. Cheers!

Answer 2

I think you're confusing concepts here between the "old" method of having individual files represent web pages which themselves contain code that is passed off to an interpreter before being sent in a response to how django/frameworks work.

If you're familiar with apache, imagine django as in part taking on the role of mod_rewrite. Django, and other frameworks, have what's called a dispatcher, or routing, mechanism.

Basically, they subscribe to the MVC pattern that says you should separate out the model, controller and view (in django parlance, model, template and view).

Now what then happens is you have a file called urls.py in django, which contains a list of routes (urls) and names of methods (usually contained in views.py) which handle them. Here's an example:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^dologin$',       'testapp.views.auth_login',         name="auth-login-uri"),
    url(r'^doopenidlogin$', 'testapp.views.auth_openid_login',  name="auth-openid-login-uri"),
    url(r'^dologout$',      'testapp.views.auth_logout',        name="auth-logout-uri"),
    url(r'^login$',         'testapp.views.loginform',          name="login-form"),
    url(r'^openidlogin$',   'testapp.views.openidloginform',    name="openid-login-form"),
    url(r'^$',              'testapp.views.index',              name="index"),
)

Here testapp is a python package, views.py is a python file and index is a django view. The url is constructed from regex, so I can have whatever I want as the url, much how stackoverflow urls are formed.

So basically, you never need file extensions again. I'd strongly suggest getting a good book on django - there are a few around.

Answer 3

What you might be looking for is the index-file.names directive in Lighty's configuration file. Just add "home.psp" to the list in your configuration file, and Lighty will look for it when no filename is specified.