Django and Lighttpd: one niggling fastCGI detail

If you are setting up a Django website using the lighttpd web server, one of the easiest ways to configure it is via fastcgi, which lighttpd has built-in support for. As I write this, the official Django FastCGI docs do a very good job of explaining everything, provided you read the whole document. (Don't just skip to the lighttpd section - relevant info is contained earlier, perhaps even in the Apache sections.)

The docs skimp over one detail that happened to affect me, however, which I'd like to document here in hopes that it will save you some time: the FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME setting. At first, when I called up the admin site and clicked the submit button to log in, I got a 404 error, for a url like "/mysite.fcgi/admin/". mysite.fcgi (not its real name :) is the url prefix I configured for the fastcgi rewrite rule in the lighttpd configuration.

After much research and fruitless tweaking of the config files, I thought to look at the HTML source of the admin login page (which served just fine). Turns out the action attribute of the login form element was set to "/mysite.fcgi/admin/", not "/admin/" or ".", like it should be. At the tail end of the above docs, I got a clue as to the cause. Long story short, defining FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME to the empty string in settings.py solved the problem.

There... hope this saves someone an hour or two!