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?

  • lemmyvoreEnglish
    7•9 months ago

    I see from your other comments that you’re already running nginx in other containers. The simplest solution would be to make use of one of them. Zero overhead since you’re not adding any new container. 🙂

    You mentioned you’re using NPM, well NPM already has a built-in nginx host that you can reach by making a proxy host pointed at http://127.0.0.1:80 and adding the following to the “Advanced” tab:

    location / {
  root /data/nginx/local_static;
  index index.html;
}

    Replace the root location with whatever dir you want, use a volume option on the NPM container to map the dir to the host, put your files in there and that’s it.

    • shnizmuffinEnglish
      2•9 months ago

      Clarity:

      NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) != npm (node package manager).

      • lemmyvoreEnglish
        3•9 months ago

        Yeah it’s not exactly an obvious feature. I don’t even remember how I stumbled onto it, I think I was looking at the /data dirs and noticed the default one.

        I haven’t tried using it for more than one site but I think that if you add multiple domain names to the same proxy host they go to the same server instance and you might be able to tweak the “Advanced” config to serve all of them as virtual hosts.

        It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have a separate nginx host. For example I have a PHP app that has its own nginx container because I want to keep all the containers for it in one place and not mix it up with NPM.