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?

  • @sudneoEnglish
    15•10 months ago

    I personally package the files in a scratch or distroless image and use https://github.com/static-web-server/static-web-server, which is a rust server, quite tiny. This is very similar to nginx or httpd, but the static nature of the binary removes clutter, reduces attack surface (because you can use smaller images) and reduces the size of the image.

    • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬OPEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      Thanks, this looks actually pretty great. From the description it’s basically BusyBox httpd but with Nginx stability and production-readiness and functionality. It also seems to be actively developed.