How is this site constructed?
Hardware
The current server is a HP 280 G2 I got for 15GBP at a car boot sale, the previous iteration of the "alpinebox" as I call it was a generic "gaming" PC with an AMD A4 6300 CPU and a wifi card from 2003 (D-Link DWL-G520)
plus 8GB of DDR3 RAM, the 120GB SSD is being re-used here because it is quiet and the 2.5" form factor means I can fit two drives in the one 3.5" bay I have in this new iteration of the box, one for system and a 500GB
HDD for an FTP server, maybe even with nextcloud or something similar.
Eventually I plan to install an i7-7700T in this box but that's is only going to commence once my current CPU becomes insufficient for my needs.
Software
I chose to use Alpine Linux because it is made to be compact and secure, therefore saving storage space on the server. As for my web daemon I used to run Apache2 directly but then switched to Nginx due to its' simplicity and docker
for ease of management because I'm also running pihole on this same server, as for my nginx configuration it is as follows: I use the official nginx container provided
from the docker hub with the config mapped from the host to nginx's config directory as read-only and /var/www mapped over with my site neatly kept in the "alpinebox" folder.
As for HTTPS I use Let's Encrypt's certbot package with crontab set to renew the certs on my server every so often, as mentioned in the log on the index page I use a custom
dockerfile which I thought to be a daunting task at first but in the end it was rather easy, now my website doesn't invoke any "this site could be malicious" type pages to pop up before users access the site.
You may notice the "Free DNS" link in the navbar, this is how I got a domain (subdomain if you're pedantic) to host my site on, this service is a good, privacy respecting DNS service if you need to set up a web domain and don't have money to pay for your own domain, so massive thanks to Josh at FreeDNS (freedns.afraid.org) for allowing this website to exist! :3
