Handling HTTP Requests
ℹ️ All the websites hosted under the
smallweb.run
domain are open-source.You can find their source code in the smallweb.run monorepo.
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 anindex.html
file, it is served at the root of the website. - if the directory contains an
index.md
file, it is rendered as html.
- if the directory contains
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 App Config for more information.
Static Websites
You can create a website by just adding an index.html
file in the folder.
<!-- 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.
The static server also supports transpiling .ts
, .tsx
, .jsx
, meaning that you can just import them from your static website.
<!-- ~/smallweb/example-static/index.html -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Example Static Website</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="root"></div>
<script type="module" src="./script.tsx"></script>
</body>
You'll need to add a pragma to the script file to tell smallweb how to transpile it.
// ~/smallweb/example-static/script.tsx
/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/[email protected] **/
import { createRoot } from "https://esm.sh/[email protected]/client";
const root = createRoot(document.getElementById("root")!);
root.render(<h1>Hello, world!</h1>);
Only use imports that are usable from the browser. jsr:
and npm:
specifiers are not supported in the browser.
If your static website contains a main.js
file, but you want to serve it as a static website, you can do the following:
- rename it to something else
- create a smallweb.json with the following content:
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.
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.
// 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.
// 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.