this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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I'm currently researching the best method for running a static website from Docker.

The site consists of one single HTML file, a bunch of CSS files, and a few JS files. On server-side nothing needs to be preprocessed. The website uses JS to request some JSON files, though. Handling of the files is doing via client-side JS, the server only need to - serve the files.

The website is intended to be used as selfhosted web application and is quite niche so there won't be much load and not many concurrent users.

I boiled it down to the following options:

  1. BusyBox in a selfmade Docker container, manually running httpd or The smallest Docker image ...
  2. php:latest (ignoring the fact, that the built-in webserver is meant for development and not for production)
  3. Nginx serving the files (but this)

For all of the variants I found information online. From the options I found I actually prefer the BusyBox route because it seems the cleanest with the least amount of overhead (I just need to serve the files, the rest is done on the client).

Do you have any other ideas? How do you host static content?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (11 children)

Forget about docker. Run caddy or some similar webserver that is a single file next to the assets to serve.

[–] sudneo 4 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Containers are a perfectly suitable use-case for serving static sites. You get isolation and versioning at the absolutely negligible cost of duplicating a binary (the webserver - which in case of the one I linked in my comment, it's 5MB of space). Also, you get autostart of the server if you use compose, which is equivalent to what you would do with a Systemd unit, I suppose.

You can then use a reverse-proxy to simply route to the different containers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Serving static app in Caddy:

sudo apt install caddy
sudo systemctl enable --now caddy

Then in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile:

example.com {
   root * /var/www/html
   file_server
}

That's all, really.

[–] sudneo 1 points 11 months ago

If there is already another reverse proxy, doing this IMHO is worse than just running a container and adding one more rule in the proxy (if needed, with traefik it's not for example). I also build all my servers with IaC and a repeatable setup, so installing stuff manually breaks the model (I want to be able to migrate server with minimal manual action, as I had to do it already twice...).

The job is simple either way, I would say it mostly depends on which ecosystem someone is buying into and what secondary requirements one has.

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