HowTo: Webserver with HTML/JavaScript/CSS/Images on ESP8266 (4 MB)

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2022-06-18 by GermanWarez

I tried to use my ESP8266 as web server, and it took me quite a journey to get it to work. What I did:

• A web server with html, js and css and image support
• A web server without any limitations regarding file size (as long as it fits into the Storage)
• It is slow (slow data transfer rate)
• It needs an non-standard firmware release, with the modules FlashFS and Storage
• Manual transfer the files to the Storage filesystem (no rsync or similar)
• http (and ws) only, no https (and wss) support (limitation of the ESP8266)

The complete solution is not easy, it needs also special loader to sequentially load the page contents. But it works for any file and any size. What I did:
https://github.com/GermanWarez/espruino-esp8266-copy-file-to-storage

That's my initial release, including

• custom Firmware (including Github Actions to build it)
• a script to support the manual transfer the the files
• a web server including a sample web page (90 seconds loading time, for around 50KB of data)
  I developed and tested the code on the ESP8266, with Espruino 2v13 and 2v14.