A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Caddy! It has HTTPS built in and provides simple but powerful configuration with sane defaults.
Example Caddyfile for a static file server:
example.com {
root * /var/www
file_server
}
I used nginx in the past, but didn't like it's verbose config files.
+1 for Caddy. It's my default webserver and reverse proxy. Built-in Https and the fact that I can get it up, running and configured in a matter of minutes are the main reasons.
The first open source contribution I made was to caddy!
Nginx! Simplex essential and easy.
Unless you need to rely a lot on CGIs then apache maybe is better.
nginx
Not sure why others are suggesting a Raspberry Pi and nginx would cause problems? I run three public facing websites on a single Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB RAM. Has been working flawlessly for 2 years. Typical uptime is measured in multiple months.
Running Wordpress, fail2ban and certbot. Booting and running of a USB drive - have considered SSD but no need as I cache to RAM for performance.
I use nginx for simple websites: https://raspberrytips.com/nginx-on-raspberry-pi/#:~:text=The%20main%20package%20for%20Nginx,made%20in%20%2Fetc%2Fnginx.
There is a NPM (nginx proxy manager) with rly nice GUI that you can run in docker container
Apache, the OG HTTP server. Fast, well documented, battle-tested, FOSS and community-led (unlike nginx which is corporate-led). People will tell you that nginx is "faster" but never point to actual benchmarks. Both are ok.
Yeah apache is awesome. Lots of settings if u want, and every question I've ever asked and probably am yet to ask has already been answered on stack with multiple duplicates aha
Check out mod_md - this module allows getting certificates from Let's Encrypt (or any other ACME cert provider) automatically. Just set this anywhere in your config, reload apache and you're set. No more fiddling around with certbot.
MDCertificateAgreement accepted
MDContactEmail [email protected]
MDomain my.example.org
Also other comments make it look like only nginx supports FastCGI (e.g. php-fpm), apache has supported talking to FastCGI since 2005:
<FilesMatch \.php$>
SetHandler "proxy:unix:/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock|fcgi://localhost"
</FilesMatch>
Yeah I use php-fpm, I didn't know much about it the first time I installed it, I just needed it for HTTP 2.
For ssl I just install certbot and let it autorun LetsEncrypt, I haven't had any issues with any of my ssl certs, it's pretty nice.
The age old LAMP stack is pretty solid, except for me it's LAPP cuz I don't wanna use mysql.
I use NGINX because it's what I'm familiar with. If I was starting again, I would probably use Caddy.
Caddy was my first and it's very easy to use. I use nginx nowadays because I heard it scales better. It's harder to use but manageable enough.
Depending on the type of website you're hosting, you can probably just use Cloudflare pages or Netlify instead of hosting it at home with a Pi.
Nginx
I have recently started using Caddy and I love it! FOSS, automatic HTTPS, super easy to setup and works well as a reverse proxy. As your website will not be complex, the Caddyfile would be just a few lines.
I would honestly go with Apache here. I use NGINX in my environment mainly as a reverse proxy. I do use NGINX to serve my static blog.
Apache httpd if php is involved. Otherwise, nginx.
Both are highly reliable and efficient.
If running php, I usually go with PHP-FPM and nginx, much faster than Apache in most cases
I only use nginx now, the out of box footprint is tiny.
add this deb https://packages.sury.org/nginx/ bookworm main to your /etc/apt/sources.list to install the latest stable
Is your site static or dynamic? If your site is made of good old HTML and CSS or your site is a SPA, any web server will serve it well.
I prefer Nginx as it is performant and versatile enough for most use cases.
Static mostly, I will have a few dynamic pages though.
If your dynamic pages leverage PHP, Nginx can be configured to support that via FastCGI. If your site has its own server runtime (e.g. a site written with NodeJS or Go), Nginx reverse proxy is literally its strength. So yeah give Nginx a try. I bet you won't regret it.
Traefik.
Traefik can't serve html itself though, can it?
It can route requests to a web server, but it can't serve the files itself iirc.
This Stack Overflow post seems to confirm this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46503797/is-there-a-way-to-serve-static-resources-with-traefik
I'm a big fan of HAProxy
I always love Flask for this, it's a super simple python web server that is basically fully batteries included, just write a couple lines of python and throw your html in either /static or /templates, depending on whether it's dynamic or not, and you're live. It's not gonna move mountains but it's not meant to.
How is the performance compared to nginx or apache?
Much lower and you shouldn't care. As long as you're serving less than one request per second, you will not need to care about performance. If you do, sanic and vibora are drop-in flask replacements and they are both much more performant.