[pbaam]

What a coincidence, some days ago I was reading some HN posts related to lighttpd and I found [1]. The link is dead and it has inappropriate content, so use arhive.org. The author doesn't go too much in detail of why nginx being purchased is a problem, but in how to configure lighttpd. And the first comment predicts the hypothetical case of F5 being problematic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413901

[synergy20]

I have been using lighttpd which can also host static content and do proxying, on top of those lighttpd supports cgi/fastcgi/etc out of the box as well, and it takes 4MB memory only by default at start, so it works for both low end embedded systems and large servers.

[nullify88]

I've recently needed to build a docker image to run a static site. I compiled busybox with only it's httpd server. It runs with 300kb of ram with a scratch image and tini.

I didn't compile in fastcgi support in to my build, but it can be enabled.

[synergy20]

yes busybox httpd or civetweb is even smaller, both around 300kb.

for tini you mean https://github.com/krallin/tini? how large is your final docker image, why not just alpine in that case which is musl+busybox

[nullify88]

Yep that tini. The docker image is about 1.90mb. It's a repack of https://homer-demo.netlify.app/ I pre-gzipped a few of the compressible file extensions too so they can be served compressed.

In this case, I didn't need alpine. I generally aim to get the image as minimal as possible without too much hassle. I end up doing stuff like this alot when I feel like a community image maybe too bloated when something like alpine or distroless can be used. Entry point scripts have all kinds of envars and a shell dependency, I'd rather rebuild the image to cater for my needs and execute the binary directly, and mount in any config via k8s.

[nickpsecurity]

I used it to avoid having to learn lots of stuff about web configuration that bigger servers might require. Between lighttpd and DO droplets, I could run a VM per static for $5 a month each with good performance. I’m very grateful for lighttpd!