How to enable public_html user homepages in lighttpd in Fedora —06 July 2009

I wanted to enable user homepages in lighttpd in Fedora, that is, so that if you go to localhost/~myuser/ you can see the user’s homepage which is in ~myuser/public_html directory. In many web servers it works like that by default, but inlighttpd in Fedora it does not. There is only one config file, /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and I searched through all options with "user" in them but nothing. Finally I looked at the settings on my Ubuntu box, and found the missing piece:

userdir.path = "public_html"