Smallweb

Smallweb is a new take on self-hosting. The goal is to make it as easy as possible to host your own apps. To achieve this, it uses a "file-based hosting" approach: every subfolder in your smallweb folder becomes a unique subdomain.

Smallweb is obsessed with scaling down. No dev server or a build is required, and you don't even need to care about deployment. You can just write a single file, hit save, and voila! Your app is live.

Example

Let's say I want to self-host my own drawing app.

First, I'll create a folder for my app:

mkdir -p ~/smallweb/draw

Then, I'll create a main.ts file in that folder:

// ~/smallweb/draw/main.ts
import { Excalidraw } from "jsr:@smallweb/[email protected]";

const excalidraw = new Excalidraw({
    rootDir: "./data"
});

export default excalidraw;

And voila! No need to run a single command, your website is already available at https://draw.<your-domain>! And each time the drawing is modified, it get automatically persited to ~/smallweb/draw/data/drawing.json.

Tired of it ? Just run rm -rf ~/smallweb/draw and it's like it never existed.

Try it out

Leave me a message at excalidraw.demo.smallweb.live, and then go create your own website from vscode.demo.smallweb.live! Also feel free to join our discord to ask any question or just hang out with us!

If you want to self-host smallweb, refer to the docs. Or alternatively, register at https://cloud.smallweb.run to get an hosted instance.

Application structure

Smallweb tries to keep it's api as simple as possible. The only requirement is to have a default export in a main.ts file at the root of your website folder

// ~/smallweb/example/main.ts

export default {
    fetch: (request: Request) => {
        return new Response("Handling request!");
    },
    run: (_args: string[]) => {
        console.log("Running command!");
    },
    email: (_msg: ReadableStream) => {
        console.log("Received email!");
    },
}

You can invoke:

• the fetch function by send a request to https://example.<your-domain>
• the run function by running smallweb run example or ssh example@<your-domain>
• the email function by sending an email to example!<your-domain>

Of course, it is super easy to hook these functions to a web framweork like hono or a cli framework like commander.

// ~/smallweb/hono/main.ts
import { Hono } from 'npm:hono'
const app = new Hono()

app.get('/', (c) => c.text('Hono!'))

export default app

And if your app folder does not contain a main.ts file, smallweb statically serves the content of the folder instead.

How it works

Smallweb is distributed as a single golang binary, and use deno as it's runtime. It uses a serverless architecture, where deno workers are spawned on-demand to handle requests.

If your pet project as no traffic, it won't consume any resources. And if it gets too popular, there is no lock-in, you can easily move to a more traditional hosting provider.

Smallweb leverages deno sandboxing capabilities to isolate each website from each other: then only have access to their own files, and can't interfere with the rest of the system.