A big thanks for saving me a shit-ton of time goes out to Emil Haukeland and his post about configuring lighttpd for wordpress. Lighttpd is a very lightweight open-source web server emphasizing high-performance with low system resources. I had been using the industry standard apache web server, but I was interested in fine-tuning my host-box like a good little dork.
Anyway mostly for my own reference here’s the code:
url.rewrite-final = (
# Exclude some directories from rewriting #
"^/(wp-admin|wp-includes|wp-content)/(.*)" => "$0",
# Exclude .php files at root from rewriting #
"^/(.*\.php)" => "$0",
# Handle permalinks and feeds #
"^/(.*)$" => "/index.php/$1"
)