Around March 2021, during the time of writing my bachelor thesis, I was looking for a cheap and quick way to host my 3DMultilayer project page. The project was just some static HTML and JS files, but it required a valid SSL certificate to be able to use the WebXR API.
So I got myself the cheapest self-managed linux server from Hetzner. Installed Ubuntu server, docker, copied-pasted some shell scripts to get an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Then I just copied the static files to the server mapped it to a basic nginx container in the ‘/var/www/html’ folder and was done.
However, changing anything on the website was a pain. In addition, it was super unstable as it was not configured to autostart the docker containers on reboot. So I had to manually start the containers every time the server was rebooted.
After a while I decided to upgrade to a more stable solution. My goals were:
The base system is the same. Just some Ubuntu server with docker (and docker-compose) installed. I started by installing Portainer. Portainer is a docker management tool that allows you to easily manage one (or more) docker hosts. It has a nice web interface and allows you to easily deploy new stacks.
// TODO finish this article :D