Description: Stuff that I'm up to
After successfully accessing the GPIO pins from the command line, my next goal was to read and write pin values from a web site. The first step is to install a web server, and the obvious choice would normally be Apache , but with the Raspberry Pi being limited in CPU and memory resources, I decided to check out lighty (lighttpd) as it has a small memory footprint. Installation is reasonably easy:
sudo groupadd www-data sudo adduser www-data www-data sudo usermod -a -G www-data www-data sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www sudo apt-get install lighttpd
The first four steps might not be necessary on distributions more recent than Debian “Squeeze”, but for me, the installation failed with an error that user “www-data” doesn’t exist. Web files can now be placed in “/var/www”. At this point it’s time to decide on a server side programming language, my initial thoughts were PHP or Python . As Python is the “official” language of the Raspberry Pi, I decided to go with that.