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These days most ISPs allow self-hosting to some extent. Programmer Mira Welner has published a 15-step tutorial to getting a working static web site up and running on a Raspberry Pi:
While tutorials abound in regards to getting a basic webserver set up, there is a difference between a functional server and a good usable website. I've been working on getting my personal site set up over the course of the past five years, spending an hour or so every month working on improving the Pi. I never intended for this personal project to become so lengthy or complex, but eventually I ended up with a fairly robust system for running, maintaining, and editing my website. This tutorial will describe what I've learned throughout the process of creating this site in 15 steps, so that you can use it to create and maintain your own sites.
This tutorial assumes that you already know how to use the command line, and that you have some understanding of HTML and CSS. That is about it.
Any always-on system is going to need to draw as little current as possible, and it is hard to beat a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which uses under 150 mA. This tutorial stands out as better than most others because of the small details filled in necessary to go from "Hello, World" page to a working, public web site.
Previously:
(2025) AI Haters Build Tarpits to Trap and Trick AI Scrapers That Ignore Robots.Txt
(2025) A Better DIY Seismometer Can Detect Faraway Earthquakes
(2024) How the Raspberry Pi is Transforming Synthesizers
(2023) Free Raspberry Pi 4B in Abandoned Scooters
... and many more.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @09:13PM (5 children)
It was on an original Pi, so I pretended it was like being on dialup
You kind of have to register on a "DDNS" service to be accessible on the WAN
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Wednesday March 12, @01:13AM (2 children)
Heh wow, I managed to go my entire career without ever hearing about XAMPP, and its not even a new project (launched 2002). All these years just self configuring my own web servers, I guess I never found it so taxing that I would look for a all-in-one installer to do it for me.
Still, very nice project, and no doubt helped a lot of people get basic web systems up and running and will continue to so in future, thanks for sharing!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday March 12, @01:30AM (1 child)
Me too! But on the positive side I now know how to install and use mariadb, nginx and a host of other technologies.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday March 12, @10:36AM
Agreed! It is a good set of skills to have :-)
And once you know how to do it, you can automate future configuration and deployments. For example nowadays I write Ansible for all config management (including home lab), so if I need a web stack I just include that role in the definition for a machine (or group of machines) and it deploys and configures the basics.
Seems XAMPP really shines in Windows, and in *nix places where you don't have root and/or want your web stack to be isolated from the OS completely, making it easy to migrate/remove/etc... As someone else mentioned on this topic, its very good for development.
When I want to do web development while on the road without internet, I've resorted to a VM with web stack installed, but that was always a bit clunky and inefficient. If I can install XAMPP in its own user on my laptop and have it host files for testing then I may have a use for it going forward. When I have some time I will dig further into it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday March 12, @04:20AM (1 child)
XAMPP has its place. It is a good crutch for those that, for whatever reasons, good or bad, are on Windows instead of having upgraded to GNU/Linux. XAMPP has its place, just not on either the GNU/Linux distros or, for that matter, any non-GNU Linux distros either.
XAMPP actually gets in the way on regular GNU/Linux systems like the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS mentioned in the fine article. The gist is that it is a non-standard approach and puts things in the wrong places, which means that documentation and forums are unable to help. There are other drawbacks, too. For basic LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and Perl/Python/PHP) your best bet by far is to stick with the packages provided by the base system and its repository. So if you are using Debian or derivatives, use APT. If you are using Arch, use pacman. And so on.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12, @04:36AM
Good for dev, not good for production.