Editing Installation Guide (section)

== Configuring the Web server ==
Vichan does not require much of a modified configuration to work.

If you are on the fence on which server to use, Nginx is more commonly used and is notably faster on larger websites. Apache, on the other hand, works more "out of the box" and may be easier to understand if less experienced with running a server. Both servers work well with vichan. If you're using constrained hardware, Lighttpd is a third software that is tailored towards light resource usage.

===Apache===
After installing apache, a simple config like this will work well. This should be located within your /etc/apache2/sites-available directory (this is in /etc/httpd/sites-available for centos or fedora):

<pre>
<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName example.com
	ServerAlias www.example.com # Optional
	<Directory /var/www/YourVichanFolder>
    		Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
    		AllowOverride All
    		Require all granted
	</Directory>

	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	DocumentRoot /var/www/YourVichanFolder
	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    ErrorDocument 403 /static/403.html
    ErrorDocument 404 /static/404.html
</VirtualHost>
</pre>
The following site config disables directory listing. Then utilize <code>a2ensite yoursiteconfig</code> and reload apache to start your website.

===Nginx===
A nginx config similar to the following will work for vichan. Make sure that php-fpm is installed (<code>apt-get install php-fpm</code> or <code>dnf install php-fpm</code>).
<pre>
server {
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    root /var/www/YourVichanFolder;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.3-fpm.sock; # Replace with the version of php you are running.
    }
    error_page 403 /static/403.html;
    error_page 404 /static/404.html;
}
</pre>

You may also want to edit either the above config or nginx.conf (within the server or http block respectively) to add the following line, which will allow files larger than 1mb.

<code>client_max_body_size 100M; #100 megabytes</code>

=== Lighttpd ===
<syntaxhighlight>
server.modules += ("mod_fastcgi")
static-file.exclude-extensions = (".php", ".pl", ".cgi", ".fcgi")
# If using a TCP port:
fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
                            ( "localhost" =>
                                    (
                                            "host" => "127.0.0.1",
                                            "port" => "9000"
                                    )
                            )
                    )
# If using a Unix socket:
fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
                            ( "localhost" =>
                                    (
                                            "socket"            =>              "/run/lighttpd/lighttpd-fastcgi-php-" + PID + ".socket",
                                            "bin-path"  =>              "/usr/bin/php-cgi"
                                    )
                            )
                    )
server.document-root = var.basedir + "/path/to/vichan"
index-file.names = ("index.php", "index.html", "index.htm", "default.htm")

</syntaxhighlight>