The time has come to start exploring alternatives to nginx for those servers only serving static files (e.g. SPA frontends) or acting as reverse proxies to a backend.
lighttpd is an open-source web server optimized for speed-critical environments while remaining standards-compliant, secure and flexible. It was originally written by Jan Kneschke as a proof-of-concept of the c10k problem – how to handle 10,000 connections in parallel on one server, but has gained worldwide popularity. Its name is a portmanteau of "light" and "httpd".
To pull the latest image:
docker pull arca.dk/mads/lighttpd:latest
This experimental Docker image is 3.43 MB in size. It includes the bare minimum for the statically linked server to run and includes the following modules:
mod_auth
mod_accesslog
mod_access
mod_redirect
mod_rewrite
mod_cgi
mod_fastcgi
mod_scgi
mod_ssi
mod_proxy
mod_indexfile
mod_dirlisting
mod_staticfile
To add new modules, you need to add them to the resources/plugin-static.h and rebuild the image.
The default configuration will dump access- and server-logs to /dev/stderr, so logs are easy to collect in case this is being executed inside a cluster with centralized logging (e.g. with fluentd). To change any configuration option, modify the lighttpd.conf or the relevant configureation in conf.d and rebuild the image.
Clone the source:
git clone git@gitlab.com:madskristiansen/lighttpd.git
Build the image:
docker build -t lighttpd:test .
Start the Docker image and publish port 80:
docker run -p 80:80 --rm --name lighttpd lighttpd:test
From another terminal, check that the server responds correctly:
curl -I localhost
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "420230896"
Last-Modified: Mon, 18 Mar 2019 18:08:05 GMT
Content-Length: 95
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2019 18:50:37 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.53
As you can see, the server is running lighttpd/1.4.53. In the default configuration, you should see the access- and server-logs dumped to the console.