PHP5.5 on Lighty

Question

I am a recent convert to Lighttpd - it beats the socks off Apache in more ways than one. I got an Ubuntu 12.04 + Lighty + PHP5.3 (FastCGI) configuration up and running with little difficulty. However, I would like to use PHP5.5 instead. Quite apart from the fact that it appears to be far more frugal in its use of memory see here the two main benefits it offers are

1. Integrated support for Zend Optimizer and
2. try..catch..finally blocks

I tried to follow the steps here but found that resulted in lighty refusing to run PHP scripts with an HTTP 403 error. I assume that this is related to FastCGI which too needs to be updated somehow to work with PHP5.5. However, Googling for this has not yielded anything useful. I'd be most grateful to anyone who could suggest the configuration changes/FastCGI ugprades needed to get things working again.

Answer 1

Answering my own question - I must have tinkered with my lighttpd.conf file and then forgotten about it. The result was that it was missing a closing " so when I issued a sudo service lighttpd restart it did not work. There was a error message but I did not notice it. I fixed the .conf error and everything is hunkrydory.

Lesson - always verify that a command to restart a service actually does as intended!