For my mum’s business, I run the website simplyfleece.co.uk. It has been through various incarnations but right now, it’s a simple website which I wrote in pure HTML and CSS (shocking!). Originally, when deploying to IBM Cloud, I was using Node JS and Express to serve the HTML. But this is overkill, especially when using Cloud Foundry.

Introducing the Static buildpack

IBM Cloud still allows users to deploy cloud applications with CloudFoundry, which I use for all of my applications. Normally I would use the NodeJS buildpack, but for simple HTML and CSS, I only need the Static Buildpack which allows simple HTML files to be served with very little config!

Simply create your website, and then create a Staticfile file, and push to IBM Cloud, and it’s ready to go!

index.html
styles.css
StaticFile

ibmcloud app push -k 64M -m 64M my-app

And that’s it! The static buildpack uses NGINX to serve the files, and if you need additional options, they go in the Staticfile and the options can be found here. For example, my SimplyFleece site has the following options for setting the file structure, and forcing HTTPS:

root: public
force_https: true