Redbean - single-file distributable web server

[robi]

redbean

single-file distributable web server

redbean is an open source webserver in a zip executable that runs on six operating systems. The basic idea is if you want to build a web app that runs anywhere, then you download the redbean.com file, put your .html and .lua files inside it using the zip command, and then you've got a hermetic app you can deploy and share.

redbean embeds Lua, SQLite, and MbedTLS into a fork() driven application server that benchmarks at 1.1 million qps on a personal computer. It's got a live bestline REPL with code completion and a UNIX module too, that lets you directly use the Cosmopolitan Libc system call interface. redbean furthermore provides sandboxing and system call tracing for security. This makes redbean a great fit for when you want to build an app that's vertically integrated into a single tiny file that runs on nearly all PCs and servers.

Others have been taking this excellence to great heights:

https://github.com/kissgyorgy/redbean-docker

The smallest possible web server in Docker!
Built from Redbean: https://redbean.dev/, a single-file distributable web server.

The final container takes only 501 kB:

$ docker images redbean-static
REPOSITORY      TAG         IMAGE ID      CREATED         SIZE
redbean-static  latest      814da89a2fa7  16 minutes ago  501 kB

or just 186 kB if you use the tinylinux version of Redbean:

$ docker images redbean-tinylinux
REPOSITORY         TAG         IMAGE ID      CREATED        SIZE
redbean-tinylinux  latest      0b98596e96d8  2 seconds ago  186 kB

Examples

There are a couple of example Dockerfiles in this repo if you want to build it yourself:

• Dockerfile-multistage of how to produce a container from "scratch"
• Dockerfile-tinylinux for the world record small version
• Dockerfile-onbuild if you just want a scratch container