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?

  • CameronDev@programming.devEnglish
    21·
    9 months ago

    RAM is not the same as storage, that 50mb docker image isn’t going to require 50mb of ram to run. But don’t let me hold you back from your crusade :D

    • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Thanks for educating me on basic computer knowledge! 🤣

      Applications need RAM, though. A full-fledged webserver with all the bells and whistles likely needs more ram than a specialized single-binary static file delivery server.

      • CameronDev@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        Sorry, wasn’t meant to be condescending, you just seem fixated on file size when it sounds like RAM (and/or CPU?) is what you really want to optimise for? I was just pointing out that they arent necessarily correlated to docker image size.

        If you really want to cut down your cpu and ram, and are okay with very limited functionality, you could probably write your own webserver to serve static files? Plain http is not hard. But you’d want to steer clear of python and node, as they drag in the whole interpreter overhead.

        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          I care about anything. RAM usage, file size, etc. I’m a minimalist when it comes to software. Use as less of all resources as possible. After once writing a router in Python I thought I could do this in Lua, too, but never actually tried. Maybe this would be a nice weekend project?

          Even if Nginx is the way to go, I currently experiment with SWS which was suggested here. Technical aspects aside: The software is actively developed and the maintainer provides Docker images on their own (easy for Deploying a container based on that) and a package for my distribution (easy for development testing).

          • Pyrosis@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 months ago

            Well op look at it this way…

            A single 50mb nginx docker image can be used multiple times for multiple docker containers.