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:
- BusyBox in a selfmade Docker container, manually running
httpdor The smallest Docker image … php:latest(ignoring the fact, that the built-in webserver is meant for development and not for production)- 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?
If your looking for a small size you could build a custom image with buildroot and lighttpd. It is way, way overkill but it would be the smallest.
For something easier use the latest image of your web server of choice and then pass though a directory with the files. From there you can automate patching with watch tower.
First thing you mention is such a fun and useful exercise. But as you point out, way overkill. Might even be dangerous to expose it. I got mine to 20kb on top of busybox.
There is something that tickles the right spots when a complete container image significantly smaller than the average js payload in “modern” websites.