After choosing the tiny BusyBox httpd server for containerised websites, I encountered third-party benchmarks suggesting NGINX was dramatically faster. Running my own A/B tests with Apache’s ab tool initially gave misleading results, which turned out to be NGINX Proxy Manager serving cached responses. With cache-busting requests, BusyBox and NGINX performed similarly over the network, so I am sticking with the 1.35MB BusyBox containers over the roughly 49MB NGINX-alpine images...
A BusyBox container serving a static site can’t fetch content over HTTPS because BusyBox ships without root CA certificates and has no package manager to install them. Rather than switch to a larger Alpine image, I settle on bind-mounting the host’s certificate directory into the container read-only, with example configurations for both docker-compose and docker run...
A follow-up on bundling static sites into BusyBox Docker containers, covering how to handle minor dynamic tasks such as periodically downloading an image into the directory of hosted static files. Rather than using cron, which behaves unexpectedly on BusyBox, my solution is a shell script with a download-and-sleep loop that runs in the background alongside the httpd server. I also note that BusyBox’s wget has TLS problems, a topic I defer to a later post...
Serving static websites from small Docker containers built on BusyBox httpd, coming in at around 4MB each. I walk through the Dockerfile setup, cross-platform builds from an M1 Mac to linux/amd64, pushing to the GitHub Container Registry, and deploying via docker-compose behind Nginx Proxy Manager, including DNS and SSL configuration...
