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?

  • @sudneo
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    13 months ago

    It really depends, if your setup is docker based (as OP’s seems to be), adding something outside is not a good solution. I am talking for example about traefik or caddy with docker plugin.

    By versioning I meant that when you do a push to master, you can have a release which produces a new image. This makes it IMHO simpler than having just git and local files.

    I really don’t see the complexity added, I do gain isolation (sure, static sites have tiny attack surfaces), easy portability (if I want to move machine it’s one command), neat organization (no local fs paths to manage essentially), and the overhead is a 3 lines Dockerfile and a couple of MB needed to duplicate a webserver binary. Of course it is a matter of preference, but I don’t see the cons honestly.