I use this script to avoid having to do the killall dance on my local dev box constantly when tweaking my lighttpd.conf

#!/bin/sh
sudo killall -9 lighttpd
sudo killall -9 ruby
sudo /opt/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /opt/local/etc/lighttpd.conf

Make the script executable (chmod u+x), put it in your path, invoke by simply typing the name of the script. This also kills off any ruby processes, which lighttpd will restart when it reboots.

The path to lighttpd and the lighttpd.conf files are based on the installation from DarwinPorts - adjust as needed.

Save the following in /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.lighttpd.plist to have lighttpd start automatically on any OS X 10.4 computer. Note that this assumes a working DarwinPorts lighttpd installation (otherwise you will need to change the paths to the lighttpd executable). Note that this also assumes that the lighttpd.conf file is in /opt/local/etc.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Labelkey>
        net.lighttpd</string>
        <key>OnDemandkey>
        />
        <key>Programkey>
        /opt/local/sbin/lighttpdstring>
        ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/opt/local/sbin/lighttpdstring>
                -f/opt/local/etc/lighttpd.confstring>
                -D</string>
        array>
</dict>
plist>