I want to host my website in my raspberry pi, I’ve read that I would need a web server software for this. Which one do you recommend? It won’t be a complex website.
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.
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
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.
lighttpd, just to be different
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
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 stableIs 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.
I use NGINX because it’s what I’m familiar with. If I was starting again, I would probably use Caddy.
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 me@example.org 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.
Hosting personal websites on your own hardware is such a pain, and I would imaging doing it on a rpi would be even more of a pain than on x86 architecture. If at all an option I’d recommend hosting on something like github pages or better still on a VPS.
Well thanks, I guess. But do you have a recommendation? I’m sure a simple website won’t cause any problems on a raspberry pi.
The main issue is not the website itself, but opening your network to be reachable from the internet in a safe way.
and sometimes you literally can’t. see CG-NAT, something my ISP is doing, so fuck me right.
Yeah CGNAT makes things a pain in the ass but it’s not a show stopper. Get a cheapie cloud VPS and install NGINX Proxy Manager (NPM) on it. Then do a WireGuard tunnel between your server and the cloud VPS. Problem solved. Or you could use Cloudflare tunnels but I wouldn’t recommend that.
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Ah OK, I might have assumed wrong then that running a server on ARM is a little trickier. Never done it. Only ever used nginx for my websites on my VPS. Don’t want to deal with the security and uptime headaches of running my websites on my home server.
I was a bit nervous about this too but I just set up a kbin instance on ARM (nginx, php, postgres, redis, and more) and didn’t notice any difference. Totally straightforward. And the VPS costs half as much as the x86 equivalent from the same host.
Oh wow genuinely interesting. Thanks, I’ve learned something. I had the wrong impression.
@railsdev @innercitadel Do you not write your web apps in assembler…?
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.
Nginx! Simplex essential and easy.
Unless you need to rely a lot on CGIs then apache maybe is better.