Smallweb

Appearance

HTTP Requests ​

Smallweb maps every subdomains of your root domain to a directory in your root directory.

For example with, the following configuration:

json
// ~/smallweb/.smallweb/config.json
{
    "domain": "example.com"
}

The routing system maps domains to directories as follows:

  • Direct subdomain mapping:

    • api.example.com → ~/smallweb/api
    • blog.example.com → ~/smallweb/blog

  • Root domain behavior:

    • Requests to example.com automatically redirect to www.example.com if the www directory exists
    • If the www directory does not exist, a 404 error is returned

WARNING

Subdomains must be alphanumeric, and can contain hyphens. You should also avoid using uppercase letters in your subdomains, as they are usually converted to lowercase. Underscores are allowed, but not recommended.

NOTE

Any folder starting with . is ignored by the routing system. You can use it to your advantage to create hidden directories that are not accessible from the web (ex: .github, or .data).

Smallweb detects the type of website you are trying to host based on the files in the directory.

  • If the directory contains a main.[js,ts,jsx,tsx] file, it is considered a dynamic website.
  • Else, it is considered a static website.
    • if the directory contains dist/index.html or an index.html file, it is served at the root of the website.
    • if the directory contains an index.md file, it is rendered as html.

You can opt-out of the default behavior by creating a smallweb.json file at the root of the directory, and specifying the root and entrypoint fields. See Manifest for more information.

Static Websites ​

You can create a website by just adding an index.html file in the folder.

html
<!-- File: ~/smallweb/example-static/index.html -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Example Static Website</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

To access the website, open https://example-static.<smallweb-domain> in your browser.

If your static website contains a main.js file, but you want to serve it as a static website, yoy can create a smallweb.json file at the root of the directory, and specify the entrypoint field to jsr:@smallweb/file-server.

json
{
  "entrypoint": "jsr:@smallweb/file-server"
}

Rendering markdown ​

The smallweb static server automatically renders markdown files as html. If you create a file named index.md in a folder (and no index.html), it will be served at the root of the website.

Single Page Applications ​

To serve a single page application, you need to redirect all requests to the index.html file. You can do this by a _redirects file at the root of the static directory.

txt
/* /index.html 200

If you're using a tool like Vite, this _redirects file should be added to the public directory.

Dynamic Websites ​

Smallweb can also host dynamic websites. To create a dynamic website, you need to create a folder with a main.[js,ts,jsx,tsx] file in it.

The file should export a default object with a fetch method that takes a Request object as argument, and returns a Response object.

ts
// File: ~/smallweb/example-server/main.ts

export default {
  fetch(request: Request) {
    const url = new URL(request.url);
    const name = url.searchParams.get("name") || "world";

    return new Response(`Hello, ${name}!`, {
      headers: {
        "Content-Type": "text/plain",
      },
    });
  },
}

To access the server, open https://example-server.<smallweb-domain> in your browser.

Routing Requests using Hono ​

Smallweb use the deno runtime to evaluate the server code. You get typescript and jsx support out of the box, and you can import any module from the npm and jsr registry by prefixing the module name with npm: or jsr:.

As an example, the following code snippet use the hono package to extract params from the request url.

jsx
// File: ~/smallweb/hono-example/main.ts

import { Hono } from "jsr:@hono/hono";

const app = new Hono();

app.get("/", c => c.text("Hello, world!"));

app.get("/:name", c => c.text(`Hello, ${c.params.name}!`));

// Hono instances have a `fetch`, so they can be used as the default export
export default app;

To access the server, open https://hono-example.<smallweb-domain> in your browser.