Simon Willison’s Weblog

Static Sites with Python, uv, Caddy, and Docker (via) Nik Kantar documents his Docker-based setup for building and deploying mostly static web sites in line-by-line detail.

I found this really useful. The Dockerfile itself without comments is just 8 lines long:

FROM ghcr.io/astral-sh/uv:debian AS build
WORKDIR /src
COPY . .
RUN uv python install 3.13
RUN uv run --no-dev sus
FROM caddy:alpine
COPY Caddyfile /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
COPY --from=build /src/output /srv/

He also includes a Caddyfile that shows how to proxy a subset of requests to the Plausible analytics service.

The static site is built using his sus package for creating static URL redirecting sites, but would work equally well for another static site generator you can install and run with uv run.

Nik deploys his sites using Coolify, a new-to-me take on the self-hosting alternative to Heroku/Vercel pattern which helps run multiple sites on a collection of hosts using Docker containers.

A bunch of the Hacker News comments dismissed this as over-engineering. I don't think that criticism is justified - given Nik's existing deployment environment I think this is a lightweight way to deploy static sites in a way that's consistent with how everything else he runs works already.

More importantly, the world needs more articles like this that break down configuration files and explain what every single line of them does.