Auto restart lighttpd on crash

To restart lighttpd if it went down or crashed, create a file check_lighttpd.sh

mkdir /usr/serverok
vi /usr/serverok/check_lighttpd.sh

With the following content

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/wget --tries=1 --timeout=30 -O /dev/null http://localhost:80/up.html

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
(
killall -9 lighttpd;
killall -9 gam_server;
killall -9 php-cgi;
/etc/init.d/lighttpd stop;
mv /var/log/lighttpd/access.log /var/log/lighttpd/access.$(date +%Y%m%d_%H).log
mv /var/log/lighttpd/error.log /var/log/lighttpd/error.$(date +%Y%m%d_%H).log
/etc/init.d/lighttpd start;
echo 'restarting lighttpd' `ps aux` | mail -s "`hostname` restarting lighttpd `who | awk '{print $6}'`" you@yourdomain.extn
datetime=`date "+%Y%m%d %H:%M:%S"`
echo $datetime "failure">>/var/log/lighttpd/check.log
)
fi

Make it executable

chmod 755 /usr/serverok/check_lighttpd.sh

Create a file up.html on web root of your web site

echo "up" > /path/to/docroot/up.html

Now set a cronjob to run every 5 minutes

crontab -e

Add following cronjob

*/5 * * * *  /usr/serverok/check_lighttpd.sh  1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null

See lighttpd