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Comment by pbaam | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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