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Comment by rednafi | Hacker News Reader

I like how the author didn’t try to be overly clever with it. They could’ve used Docker to install and isolate dependencies, Caddy or Traefik to serve the site and manage SSL automatically, maybe even k3s to run a mini cluster for HA, Tailscale to avoid manual port forwarding, Terraform for future auto-provisioning without hassle, or Ansible to prepare the machine and all that jazz.

Instead, they took the simplest possible route that works: installing the web server on bare metal, serving plain HTML and CSS, and using direct port forwarding via the router. This was a delightful read.

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I really appreciated the blog post because it taught me something I’ve always wanted to learn but avoided because PaaS made me complacent.

Three years ago, I tried to publish a website on a VPS in the morning to present it to a client at lunch. This was before ChatGPT. I spent hours trying but got nowhere. At the meeting, having failed to publish it, I had to run it locally and share my screen. I was frustrated.

Later, I discovered Heroku, which solved all my problems. Eventually, I migrated to VPS + CapRover, and now I use VPS + Coolify.

I’m happy with my setup—it works—but I’ve always felt guilty for not knowing how to publish a simple website without Docker.

It took me much longer than I'd like to admit to publish my first bare-metal website on a VM. The main issue was SSL—I could never configure Nginx for multiple sites on the same server with TLS. Setting up DNS and pointing your domain to your server also requires some fiddling. It’s not intuitive, and there aren’t many people doing this, so resources with full end-to-end examples are limited.

However, with tools like Caddy and Let’s Encrypt, the process has become easier. That said, it still involves quite a bit of fiddling if you want to automate everything and make it reproducible without a lot of hassle. Now, I do it all the time for fun. But that said, if it's a static site, then I don't see much point in self-hosting when Cloudflare Page and GitHub Page are so much more convenient.

Nowadays, certbot can configure either Nginx or Caddy automatically. Make sure you install the appropriate plugin with apt (if you're using apt).

I appreciated this as well. Going in I was expecting a long winded technical report detailing npm compatibility issues or bundle size optimizations but no, they're simply setting up an apache webserver and shipping HTML/CSS.

If its for you there is no need to overcomplicate it. Complexity is just for job security :)

> installing the web server on bare metal,

On top of a Linux distro is not what people usually call bare metal

I've heard it called bare metal as opposed to a docker container or VM.

This is the Wikipedia definition which is the same thing as I said. If it's on top of an OS, it's not bare metal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_machine

Yeah, you're correct by the original definition - but in the modern context of Docker/k8s and web servers, "bare metal" is being colloquially used to refer to installing directly on the bare OS, and people understand that.

I found that today "bare metal" is used equivalent to "non-cloud". I think this is pathetic.

Maybe it is, these days? As much as I appreciate all the functionality brought to us by these tools, when I started web-dev circa 2005, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL + PHP) was the go-to for hobbyists.

As much as I look back at the simplicity (Apache config was not that difficult for a small site, at least with Apache 2.0), the part of me that operates production software these days gets anxiety the idea of it all.

And yet, when I wrote a small website to host my wedding website last year, it was indeed Linux, (some webserver), Postgres and PHP, with me copying files manually to FTP. It was probably nginx but you know what, I paid a company £50 for a large amount of storage, bandwidth, a domain and SSL certificate, for year, and everything went dandy. Horses for courses and all that.

I'm sure 100% of the people who read that comment understood what it meant.

However many layers of abstractions deep you are, please try and get yourself out of there. The air down there ain't good for ya.

Yeah. I used it for a lack of better term. But you get the idea.

It is the correct term

It is not https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_machine

Now that's just goofy, I get why they have similar names but it's begging for misunderstandings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-metal_server

Can't remember the name (if it has one), but there's a linguistic phenomenon where words take on opposite meanings from the original. The "Peacemaker" was a missile, "literally" now means "figuratively", "awful" used to mean "awe-inspiring". And apparently "bare metal" now means "runs on an operating system".

OTOH, technical fields develop jargon specifically as a solution to the problems created by semantic drift in vernacular vocabulary.

Sure, languages evolve, but that doesn't mean "anything goes" -- to the contrary, novel mutations have to survive intense selection pressures in order to eventually become part of the standard language.

Where new ways of using existing terms create ambiguity and conflict with existing meanings, their survival chances aren't always great.

Although, there are multiple people in the talk section[0] arguing for the "'physical' machine" definition. Might have to get used to it, along with "crypto" and "algorithm".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bare_machine

The trendy uses are "algorithim" and "crypto" are specific cases of the general meanings of these terms -- there's no contradiction or ambiguity introduced here, so these uses are OK, although people presuming the narrower trendy meanings in broader contexts are wrong.

This use of "bare metal" does contradict the pre-existing meaning, so is not quite appropriate. What is valid is describing the OS itself as running on bare metal in contrast to running within a VM/container -- but an application running on top of that OS is not running on bare metal.

This isn't particularly egregious, though, since there are negligible cases of actually running applications on bare metal today: if you are talking about applications, the context can usually explain the intended meaning. But that wasn't always the case in the past (PC "booter" software used to be common), so this doesn't necessarily apply retrospectively, and may not be the case in the future, especially considering some of the interesting things companies like Oxide are working on.

You shouldn't back off a correct statement just because some rando on the internet challenges you. Bare metal is absolutely the correct terminology here.

Hehe. Not big on picking fights over minutiae. Also, English isn't my first language, so there's always a chance of making legit mistakes when picking terms. But in my 7 years of working in the industry, I've heard it used in this context by many.

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