Hosting

You can easily host a CDN for free using Docker and fly.io. In this guide you will learn how to do this with minimal requirements.

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Requirements

You don’t need to have a lot of experience with Docker or CDNs in general to host a go-fast-cdn for the first time. All you need is:

• very basic knowledge about your terminal of choice.
• Docker downloaded and running on your machine.

Getting started

You could clone the Github repository but you don’t need to do that, as already built binaries are available in the releases tab. So all you need to do is make a new directory on your machine where we will work from.

You can create a new directory by running the following command in your terminal:

mkdir go-fast-cdn

From there you need to make a new Dockerfile, which you can do either with the following command, or just by making the file with your favorite text-editor.

touch Dockerfile

From there you need to paste the following lines into the Dockerfile, which will copy the go-fast-cdn binary made for Linux distributions and serve it on port 8080.

FROM alpine:latest

ARG GO_FAST_VERSION=0.1.6

RUN apk add --no-cache unzip openssh

# download and unzip go-fast-cdn
ADD https://github.com/kevinanielsen/go-fast-cdn/releases/download/${GO_FAST_VERSION}/go-fast-cdn_${GO_FAST_VERSION}_linux_amd64.zip /tmp/cdn.zip
RUN unzip /tmp/cdn.zip -d /cdn/

EXPOSE 8080

# start go-fast-cdn
CMD ["/cdn/go-fast-cdn"]

Now, when you have saved the file, you can test if it works as expected by building the container. For this step make sure that you have Docker running on your machine.

docker build . -t cdn

If it builds successfully, you can run it with the following command

docker run -p 8080:8080 cdn

If it runs, you have now officially containerized your own CDN and you can go to localhost:8080 and see if it works as expected.

Hosting

From here, you can use your CDN as you wish, and host it where you want. If you want to host it for free, you can do so on fly.io.

To do so, you need to install the flyctl cli-tool on your machine. To install the tool, just follow the instructions here.

When flyctl is installed, you can run

flyctl launch

A configuration menu should now appear, and you can follow the instructions listed. If everything goes well you should be greeted with the following text:

Visit your newly deployed app at https://{your-chosen-name}.fly.dev/

Congratulations! You have now hosted your very own CDN.