I host a num­ber of stat­ic web­sites on my per­son­al serv­er. Over the years, they have been served by a va­ri­ety of web server­s, but I re­cent­ly de­cid­ed I want­ed to make it easy.

So, I looked for a mod­ern and min­i­mal­is­tic web serv­er that sup­port­ed a fea­ture of the ven­er­a­ble thttpd

That fea­ture is au­to­mat­ic vir­tu­al hosts. The main idea is that you have a fold­er and in there a bunch of sub­fold­er­s, each one is a site. And the name of the fold­er is the name of the site.

So, if I have /srv/ralsina.me then when a user asks for http://ralsina.me they get that. And if I have /srv/whatever.com and the user asks for whatever.com they get that.

Al­so, if a site is reach­able with more than one name, then just add sym­links and it should just work.

I found a way to do it us­ing Ng­inX but that's far from min­i­mal­is­tic.

So, I looked around and found that Cad­dy was pret­ty close ex­cept it did­n't do the au­to­mat­ic stuff.

So, I wrote the miss­ing bit, threw ev­ery­thing in a dock­er con­tain­er and now I have a 30-minute project that serves all my stat­ic sites.

Here's the dock­er com­pose I am us­ing:

version: "3.8"
services:
  web:
    logging:
      driver: journald
      options:
        tag: web
    container_name: web
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true
    ports:
      - 8080:8888
    volumes:
      - /data/websites/:/srv/
    image: ghcr.io/ralsina/caddy-static-arm64:latest
    restart: always
networks: {}

And here's the pro­jec­t: cad­dy-stat­ic

It probably needs some tweaking for anyone else specially in the Caddyserver config and maybe in the template it uses to generate sites which is hardcoded.

If any­one ac­tu­al­ly us­es this I can make those things con­fig­urable.