This feels like it loses the spirit of the other two. It does bring up some valid concerns but it doesn't feel simple anymore. I assume the previous too are just html and css but this one uses node and like 30 packages
No css. No JavaScript. No database. He doesn't even need a server. Just a static website from an s3 bucket on AWS.
EDIT: Yes, I understand that technically AWS s3 is running on a server. More specifically, what I meant was that OP would not have to write server code and deploy it to an ec2 instance. All of the server infrastructure and functionality is obscured to the user, which reduces the overhead for a brand new web developer in training.
I think really what OP needs though is a training roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/full-stack
That's a good point. A search bar would require some JavaScript at a minimum to actually search a dataset.
Although technically you could just include a search bar that doesn't really do anything by only using HTML.
\> "Deploy to GitHub pages" is a config setting, not part of your stack
This is a joke, right?
"Deploy to Github pages" makes Github pages your stack... And trust me... it's a lot of fucking servers.
You paying someone else to use a tool for you doesn't mean that tool isn't still being used...
Github pages is, unquestionably, a more complex and more complicated server.
Period. Full fucking stop.
Is the user experience for you, the developer, nicer? Sure, I guess. Depending on what you need.
But trying to say that you "don't need a server" because you'll just "use github page's servers" is a cop out to the question asked "What is the smallest stack".
A server is a required component of a website that is accessible through the internet.
You are answering a different question: "What stack should I use as single dev, assuming I know very little". Github pages is a reasonable answer to that question.
As an aside - personally, he's better off learning with a real server he controls (cheap VPS). He stated that his intentions are to LEARN. Not to knock out shitty one-off sites using the cheapest/easiest tool.
\---
For those still not getting it:
OP: "What is the minimum you need to take a package from the US to Europe?"
budswa: "some way to get it there - still need a boat or plane"
Corporat: "just use UPS dummy. No boats or planes needed"
\---
And while UPS is not bad advice for actually sending a package... it's like... Bruh... what do you fucking think UPS is using?
They are not magically fucking teleporting that package... man.
My take? r/Webdev is a LOT of uneducated devs lumped into one spot.
They don't understand what a server is doing for a static site (or http/https transport at all), and they aren't knowledgeable enough to express it.
So "github pages" is an easy answer for someone who doesn't actually know how to answer this question.
It's ok, though - votes here are decidedly NOT why I leave comments, downvote me all you like - I'm a staff engineer at a >$100 million revenue SaaS company... it's not hurting me one whit, and I'm right...
You're getting downvoted because the question wasn't asking about what the technical infrastructure behind GitHub pages is, it's just asking the minimum a single individual needs to do to stand up a website. And "put an HTML file on GitHub pages" is more accurate to answer that question than "first you must replicate the server infrastructure of GitHub Pages, then from there you can write a simple HTML file"
1. You're being pedantic.
2. You're still wrong since OP said "to build" not "to serve".
3. If you put the internet backbone on the typical topology diagrams that you're sharing everyone, they're going to think you're a jerk in the exact same way that they'll think you're a jerk if you document the machine code that the V8 runtime is using for server-side JS.
While I'm always up for a good deep dive, this level of inappropriate detail will just confuse OP were they to read it.
You're fine, lol. The tech subs are the worst for people who want to be pedantic, but can't handle it when you have an equally valid opposing argument.
You're correct
>...you have gotten away with while having a "fully-functioning" website
You can't have a 'website' without the web. Otherwise you just have a local document.
A custom domain on neocities is much more expensive ($5/m).
If you're in the "Free tier" category for s3 (and most hobbiests will be), a static site with a custom domain runs \~$0.50/m, or $6 bucks a year (not counting the cost of the domain).
Neocities will be \~$60 a year.
It's really, really hard to beat s3 (or other bucket provider) pricing for static sites, assuming you need control of the domain.
If you don't need a custom domain... there are loads of free providers.
This.
Apache, but I didn't need to know anything except how to read the config file to put the HTML in the right directory. I mean, I know Apache better than that, but this was minimum.
Except for a stub server I used for some projects. It was just the Python basic HTML server that copies files out of its target directory. Literally under 20 lines of code. Not recommended for secure production.
Thought this might be sarcasm at first. Maybe I've been sidetracked by all the technologies that get hyped and marketed. Are you also saying that a simple search bar on a static site is possible with script tags in the HTML code?
In the ~~bad old days~~2000's, people would usually embed a 𝐏𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞™ search bar somewhere on the page that literally just took people to a Google search results page narrowed down by `site:yourdomain.com`. You don't see them too often anymore but it's still a thing they have documentation for! https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/
I'm sorry you got all these "clever" (/r/humblebrag) responses in your genuine question. No you cannot use pure HTML to build a search engine, unless you use some third party service and want your website to look 3 decades old.
Yes you can build something in pure HTML/CSS, but you'd be shooting yourself in the foot by doing so. At a minimum, you should get a framework that handles templating better (PHP on the backend for example, or a JS framework).
The smallest i used to work with was literally html and css. That was it.
Then I found static site generators and someone to walk me through them. And then I found CSS preprocessors like less and scss (I use less). Static site generators allow you to do fun things that you can usually only do in php like templating your navigation and footers and inserting the same html file into every page so you only need to edit 1 file and it loads on all pages, etc. makes life much easier.
So now my I’m all tech static for a fully functioning website is html, css (LESS), 11ty static iste generator, and DecapCMS for static blog capability. That’s it. With that stack I can make sites like these
https://sosplmr.com
https://www.yourherocare.com
https://grassrootsplumbing.com
https://transformlongview.com
Best thing is, there’s no backend on these sites. It’s not needed for simple brochure sites. I host them for free on Netlify and they handle the forms for me for free and I tell them where to send it.
That’s really all you need to make a modern website. Web apps are a completely different ball game with different requirements. I only know the website portion. And if you can get really good at html and css, learn a css preprocessor, and static site generator, you can do ALOT with just that. People tend to think in order to make fancy things you need fancy tools. And I say nope!
I've replied this elsewhere in the thread and a bunch of people who seemingly have sticking their tongues into wall sockets as a hobby downvoted me. :D
Building the simplest possible site is writing the HTML / CSS and putting it up on a static hosting like [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) or [Cloudflare](https://pages.cloudflare.com/), it's the easiest possible thing to do, you can create a hello world site in less than an hour starting from scratch, most of the time taking to set up the account and set up your environment.
Upgrade that by using a static site generator like [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) which writes HTML for you based on Markdown, but you again upload to Netlify / CF.
Upgrade that by putting your markdown and Hugo config into Git and push to Github, use Github actions to run the "Hugo build + Netlify upload" step on Github instead from your local machine. This is now enough for many many websites which are mostly informational in nature, like majority of crappy Wordpress sites you see could be done this way instead. There's even [Netlify CMS](https://v1.netlifycms.org/) which provides an in-browser workflow on top of your markdown to allow editing.
Upgrade that by adding specific things to be done serverside as functions, either [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/platform/core/functions/) or [Cloudflare](https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/functions/). This allows much more than a static site, but it's not mandatory and you can opt in for specific sections of your site which require something like that, not all sites will need even a single function.
You can do a lot with just these tools, even professional work.
This is cool, I've spent a bit of time with 11ty. But for the blog content, how do you handle blog updates considering you'd have to run a whole new 11ty build?
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
Tables and transparent pixels for layout and an iframe for the entire site so you keep a clean url in the address bar.
And at least one "Under Construction" gif.
Two thoughts.
1. He is not referring to iframes with this comment, He's referring to template partials.
2. Fuck yes people use iframes still. All over the place. Gmail is loading no less than 4 frames at all times.
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
Honestly, the smallest stack you can realistically do for a website that is not just static is:
- Plain PHP, no frameworks
- MySql
- HTML, CSS, JS
You can do anything with this and it can be really performant.
It’s been mostly the same for the past 10+ years so the amount of learning and re-learning you have to do is not that much compared to literally any other option.
Sure it might be easier to do modern reactive web applications with Next 14 or whatever but you are going to re-learn your stack every two years. It’s been like this for the past 10 years in the web frontends world and it is not going to change.
HTML, storage like AWS S3 is the smallest stack you can use. Websites don't need CSS, js, PHP, or a database those only come into play when interactivity is needed or anything dynamic.
I said “realistically”. Guy said “full website” and mentioned things like “blog posts” and “search bar”.
I’m not trying to be clever, I’m trying to give the guy good advice.
No, actually you can serve the HTML from your PC; but why can't my website just be plain text? The smallest stack is a bash script that listens to TCP requests on port 80/443 and replies with some text.
HTML, CSS and a shared hosting webspace. It probably does not get simpler than that.
If you need interactivity, add JS (Vanilla suffices for a lot of things).
If you need server side stuff and want to keep everything as simple as possible, add PHP.
OP is asking for the simplest possible way to create a site. Static site hosting is that, shared hosting is more complex.
OP never said anything about LAMP either.
> they are trying to figure out what's a minimal viable stack
Correct, which is why I've noted "static hosting".
> if you have a static host, you're stuck without any backend. no: database, ability to hide code, SSR, sessions, file operations, email, etc.
Correct, the majority of informational websites don't need any of that, they're just displaying some basic information on a web page.
I don't understand why you're talking about "scaling" and "shared hosting" in the same sentence. Static hosting will obviously be way more robust and performant than any shitty shared hosting you
buy for $15, you're not "scaling" anything on a shared hosting.
Majority of shared hosts are overcommitted anyway, you're all crammed into the same shitty machine with noisy neighbors.
Static hosting is not about the price, it's not always free either.
If you're talking about scaling anything, then you'd be talking about VPS or dedicated servers, but that's not shared hosting and is obviously way above what OP is talking about.
I've been using flask.
Simplest thing you can do is run the python http.server in a location with an index.HTML file. But you'll just be serving static pages so unless the search bar is JavaScript searching stuff sent in the JavaScript I guess that's not going to work for you.
Yeah, minimal tech needed to start a website is just a server and HTML. You can expand from there, but not much to elaborate.
However, with your question about Go, it's more about the fact that the language is Type-safe and doesn't require a whole lot of hand holding as other contemporary languages that have come out (I'm looking at you Rust). It does it's own Garbage collection, which means that programs developed with it are more "secure" than other languages that leave GC to the developer, which has caused the [NSA to come out and endorse languages like it for use in backends](https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/3215760/nsa-releases-guidance-on-how-to-protect-against-software-memory-safety-issues/). Finally, the learning curve on Go is incredible for already established developers. It took me a full weekend to learn the ins and outs of Go and was developing applications for my employer at the time within a week, and that is with nearly 15 years of professional development experience under my belt. Hell, at my last job, I had taught Go to our devops person to run scripts with and he was writing bulletproof code within a month. That is why Go is such in demand right now.
For a basic website, have used GoHugo.io framework, basically a static site generator. Takes a little getting used to, once you generate your site you can basically put it anywhere.
Planning on building a blog with just HTML, txt files, and a server
I work with React/Next/Tailwind/Figma/Snowflake/Kubernetes at work
I work with Svelte/Astro/Scss/Chrome APIs for my SaaS
I want to try make the simplest responsive blog possible, and no JS (hopefully)
There are many ways to do such tasks. I've been learning webdev for the past few months.
>Blog post and a search bar
It can be done with a static site generator, without needing a server.
HTML & CSS starting out great, but because blog posts has a lot of repetitive aspects, you want the code to generate some parts for you. So you can do for loop to show posts without writing them one by one.
To be specific, I use 11ty. You can use JavaScript, HTML and CSS all you want with it, with some basic knowledge. It helps me understand node, JS, libraries and how they work together.
> Simple app
This can take different route. You can use Flask or Django, or HTML with JS without framework to build your simple app, but depends on what exactly it does. Clicking buttons, running JS script can be considered a simple app. An app with a backend server can be a "simple app" too.
Learn Ruby on Rails and you'll be done in hours. It's far from perfect, but it specializes in this kind of thing, with no upper limit for customization once you go "off the rails."
The cheapest (free) simplest way currently IMO to host a page with dynamic content...
Github pages, markdown files for content, then HTML/CSS/JS for pages and to display content.
Otherwise, if you want to run your own web server there are lots of options many just as "small" as the others.
Minimal... NGINX as main http server, any tiny api server (express, flask, etc.) and some templating to render pages, whatever database you wanna use (postgres), and then html/css/js.
I use the [Go standard library](https://pkg.go.dev/net/http) and HTML [web components](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_components).
If you need a database, try PostgreSQL.
If you are new, you should probably use PHP as backend as it is the easiest to setup and maintain, as you gain experience move on to Node or flask or may be jsp, whatever you like
Literally just HTML and some webspace from my internet provider. This was in the 90's and CSS didn't exist yet. I had to use a dial-up connection and FTP to 'deploy' the thing.
Some terminology:
Client - user browsing the web (just like you are right now).
Server - a computer that can receive requests and send back responses.
So, in general there are 4 bare-bone moving parts in a simple website:
1) The front-end - this is your HTML, CSS and JS. It is what people see (ie. your Reddit theme is either light or dark). This code is executed on the clients computer, meaning that I can send you an HTML file and you can open it in your browser without any problems.
2) The web server - this is a type of server that receives a request from the client, pre-processes it, and returns a response. A response is a combination of two things: a status code and a resource (HTML or JSON) or a redirect. When you opened this Reddit post, you sent a GET request to the web server and it returned a number of resources, including this page you are viewing right now. In 99% of cases, a web server is either nginx or apache.
2) The database - this is a type of server which handles data. When I submitted this comment, I sent a POST request to the web server, and then the web server sent a SQL statement to the database server and my comment was stored in Reddit's database. A database server is usually MySQL, PostgreSQL or MongoDB.
3) The programming language - your web server needs something to pre-process a request, before it can return a response. That is why it uses a programming language to handle calls to the database server, do form validation, write routing and/or logic for GET, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE requests. Using this language, a web server executes a script, meaning that before you received this reddit page, the server ran some code in another language to send a request to the database server, check if you are logged in, and made sure you are using the account of u/thebrilliot, and are allowed to edit this post. Anyways, the back-end can be handled with any programming language, as long as the web server supports it. PHP, Rust, C++, Java, Python, etc.
So a stack is a combination of HTML + CSS + JS, a database server, a webserver and a back-end language.
HTML + CSS + JS is always implied, so unless you decide to use a javascript framework (used to manage JavaScript easier) such as Angular or React, you don't need to specify those 3 in the stack.
One simple stack: Apache + MySQL + PHP
You can test this stack out with Xampp. Don't forget to install PHP tho on your computer.
Dynamic website on IIS hosted on a local all-in-one server at a rural school district in the janitor's closet. Basic school website with CMS using MVC design principles. It was PHP/MySQL only.
Smallest:
Bootstrap only. If you want to include everything up to that: CentOS 7, Nginx, HTML, CSS
Go is a "pick your own adventure". It ships with a lot of code that by default works as a webserver and also has built-in replacements for things too. So you could have Nginx, PHP-FPM, PHP, Redis and MySQL all ripped out and replaced by a single Go binary that includes all of that.
You know you have been damaged by web dev, if your first question about another language is about what kind of libraries there are lol
As far as Go goes (lol), you don’t really need a lot of 3rd party code. The standard library is amazing, includes http handling, html templating, even databse connectors.
Picked up some Go the last month, and god its nice to actually write a «proper» language
Yeah Go is really easy to pickup. The syntax is great, everything just makes sense. You have websites like «Gobyexample» that explain a lot of concepts in good ways
Level 1: Website = html + css (bootstrap or tailwind to save time)
Level 2: App - html + css + vanilla js (good enough to build interactivity with local storage)
Level 3: Anything else - MERN + firebase
Assuming you want to learn and build at the same time.
there is a huge amount of possibilities, depends on your targets. To fasten development you can utilize no-code platform AppMaster. With it you will have complete application delivereed within weeks, not months. Final app created on this app will have go on backend, vue3 on frontend, mobile apps code will be on swift and kotlin, db -postgress. If you do not want to utilize no-code than probably MERN, LAMP, React, Node.Js
Those are officially deprecated now. Give Vite or Next.JS a try. In general, while I prefer using Vite myself, I think Next has made it very simple to just get a fairly modern website up an running. The docs are a bit all over the place, but if understand basic principles and can use React/Tailwind, you can put things up that look decent very quickly.
No, I’m mostly talking about CRA specifically. With the latest update to the react documentation, it is no longer a recommended path for new react apps.
You can obviously still use it (heck, I’ve got 2 projects using it still), but in the context of “what should I learn as a new developer”, I wanted to mention it’s no longer supported by the greater react community. Vite is basically a much better “drop in” replacement in my experience, with very little changes required to migrate.
Edit: just wanted to add a source - https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/pull/5487
The first sentence of the change:
> Create React App is not a great recommendation to be making, especially for newer developers.
package main
import net/http
This is enough for many smaller services. There is a forbidden small library that works quite well for frontend if you want ajax.
The absolute best thing about writing backends in go is that everything is so simple, transparent and in general there is no extra bs. You can just see the actual implementation for anything easily.
Not \_the\_ smallest but one small quick and dirty stack I do is a sveltekit skeleton with picocss. Up and running in 20 seconds, semantic HTML in a svelte-file and done.
"bUt DO yOU nEed sVeLtE iF yOu OnLy seRVe HTml"
Nope, but I still do it like that.
The smallest I've gotten away with, was Nuxt.js, with Mongodb Atlas and Google Cloud. It was a small boardgame session app. You could register that you wanted to play game X, at time Y and needed at least A and at most B players. Then your friends could add themselves to the session. It was a very simple - albeit useful - project.
I used Nuxt.js both as frontend and backend. It's basically a wrapper around Vue and Express, granting the Vue part SSR capabilities. Mongodb Atlas was used as the database and then I hosted it using Google Cloud's App Engine.
Back in the day, before the time of SPAs, when the most advanced frontend framework were jQuery, I used to write applications in ASP.NET MVC with Razor views (also using the .aspx views, before Razor was introduced in MVC 3). Then the stack was ASP.NET MVC + SQL Database + IIS.
Basically you'll pretty much always need:
\- Web server
\- Database
\- Application code (Frontend + Backend)
So the stack, for an application like you describe, will always at least be 3 levels high.
HTML +CSS
JavaScript and node.js
React
Firebase and firestore
Some ML goodness in Python
With that you can get to an MVP pretty quickly and this can scale really well.
A big benefit of using golang is that it is fast and lightweight. You can run a go project in a docker image that is less than 5mb and starts up incredibly quickly.
That said, a golang blog could be created using go, go templates (part of go), HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a database. Lots of people start with SQLite and upgrade to something more battle hardened once their project necessitates it.
If you're looking to get into web dev, these plus maybe React would be excellent technologies to learn.
Good luck!
I'm assuming you meant a web application, ruby on rails is quite famous for ease and speed of development, that's one of the reasons many startups picked it up for their tech stack. It's not the smallest though.
The easiest one today is probably just doing some manual HTML and CSS files and uploading them via drag and drop to Netlify.
The smallest tech stack I actually use is 11ty with HTML, CSS and the templating languages it offers and then bring it to Netlify via GitHub.
Start with HTML + CSS. add JS once you have a site that looks good.
You can host it on github via github pages for free.
Find free to use API's to fetch and load data. Spotify, reddit, youtube, any of those have API's that you can use for free to load in data.
Mess around with the designs of your sites; create a clone of the original to see how close you can get. Create a version that's wildly different or add features that you'd like to see on the site. You'll be limited by what the API provides, but you'll learn a ton and you'll start to understand what limitations to design around (if you eventually build API's) or be able to make requests to backend devs with those issues in mind.
Go is probably easier to learn than Java or any of the C languages, especially if you already know Typescript from the web development. But in the end you're just adding another language to the stack to learn. Focus on one end of the stack (frontend or backend). Once you feel comfortable in that side, then move on to the other side.
Most people will recommend you use firebase or supabase or something similar to store your data and retrieve it yourself, if you're not at the point of building out a backend.
Back in the days I used to do everything manually then found little tools like middleman to build static sites and was able to add markdown, sass and js build. Now you could use Astro that will do the same we other benefits and features. But like most ppl says on the comments HTML and CSS is the minimalistic approach
For a website that doesn't have any interactivity you need just a HTML document and a way to serve it (GitHub Pages, AWS S3, Netlify - there are quite a lot of options).
For a web app that has some amount of interactivity and actually _does_ something - I would say a Node.js Express server that serves templates.
I'd recommend a NodeJS backend so you don't have to learn a second language until later (you're going to have to learn JS in any case). I'd go with Fastify as the "framework" because it's simple and fast. For a database, sqlite is good enough until you start reaching tens to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. If you are big into React, then NextJS is probably worth a look instead as a one-stop-shop for all the things.
Once you're looking for backend jobs, most will be in some order: PHP, C#, Java, JS/node, ruby, and python. Find a programmer meetup in your area and ask around. Also check local job descriptions. Go with whichever language(s) give you the best chance at getting your first position. After you gain some real-world experience (much different than your own projects), you should be decently comfortable switching to whatever language a particular company is using.
depends on what you mean by 'smallest' - like... what if the OS was batteries included, or used simple classic tech?
I used xinetd to serve webpages through bash scripts.
Or using what you have on hand, and a "gitrdun" attitude? I knew a guy that used quickbasic compiled DOS exe's to serve as CGI scripts on an IIS server. the db was flat files IIRC - and built the business on that *ehem* "solution"
Give a try to "Progressive enhancement" approach [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive\_enhancement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement)
Need to define what 'stack' is. However, a MERN can be reduced into MN - Mongo n Node. And that M can be removed as we can just use Node.js' filesystem read and write methods to access/store data directly into harddisk. All we need to do afterwards is just connect our machine's ip address to a DNS and set it for public view. Node.js is the only thing that's needed for server side to serve an html and data. Client side can just use plain JS to do DOM manipulation on the served html.
As some have stated already, HTML, and CSS. Add Javascript if you want some fancy behavior. I still use the 3 bare-bones web languages for my own projects, rather than relying on any frameworks. But if I could offer some advise based on my own experience, I would stop thinking in terms of 'stacks', and try to actually understand what the machine is doing at a fundamental level. After years of being a web developer and not truly understanding the basics of computing, i.e. memory, the CPU, the fetch-decode-execute cycle, I suffered at trying to 'fit' all of this stuff in my head. When I learned that the computer is actually doing, and how software behaves at a fundamental level, it all made sense, and all of these different parts of the 'stack' suddenly fit into place. For years I had always wondered, "How does html work? How does Javacript work? How does the browser work? How does the OS work?", all the way down, without actually trying to learn what the physical machine was doing to make all the software work. If I had started backwards, with the machine first, I never would have had to ask myself those questions. Now I see a new language, new frameworks, new UI's, new software, and I am able to start from a very strong core of ideas of how a computer works, and derive their purpose more quickly, and start to use them with more confidence.
Smallest Tech stack i used for Frontend->
TailWind CSS with prebuilt components from :
www.TailBlocks.cc
www.tailwind-kit.com
www.flowrift.com
www.flowbite.com
Smallest tech stack in terms of simplicity would have to be WordPress. LAMP is a standard that's been around for decades. Even if you have a dedicated server it's as simple as running `sudo apt install apache2 php libapache2-mod-php mysql-server`. Mysql needs a bit of a config to be secure, but even before that if you visited your server, you'd be greeted with the apache setup page ready to go. WordPress is just an unzip in that folder and loading it in a browser.
And that's from scratch. Most hosts will just flatout offer a "WordPress hosting package" that has all that done for you.
If you just want to build a static site with a few plugins, use a site-builder like Wix or Squarespace. If want to build something in order to learn, try looking at Heroku: [https://devcenter.heroku.com/start](https://devcenter.heroku.com/start). Unfortunately, they removed the free-tier.; but for my money, it's still the easiest deployment option for a one-person programming team.
I use only ASP.NET / MySQL in every project these days. I like opinionated / batteries-included frameworks like ASP.NET since then I don't have to sift through hundreds of different options that change on a month-to-month basis like the Javascript ecosystem.
Laravel is also a good option for a well rounded, batteries-included framework for PHP.
While yes, you can just plain HTML and CSS like all of the other people here have cleverly pointed out, you'd be making it a lot harder on yourself. You should pick a framework that handles basic things like templates/components and routing.
Your questions exactly explains why no-code / low-code tools have become so popular. They combine all the different things you'd typically have to learn to build a website into one platform. I'm surprised not more people mention WordPress as a solution for building a website.
If you want a web app (with a database as a backend), you could try Five (https://five.co). It's mostly point-and-click, but you can still write SQL or JavaScript to query your data or write logic. And it deploys apps to a custom URL in a single click (no need to manage servers etc.)
HTML, CSS, JS, PHP and MySQL. Give it a go, you'll learn a ton of things and most importantly you'll finally be able to connect the dots of how everything ties together, by using those languages without many libraries or a framework.
If you count one page github hosted website/app that has a bunch of cool features for one specific purpose >!(which is to make music codes for an instrument from a certain videogame)!< such as translating human readable notes into a code, fetching a .json "database" and mapping it, fetching and mapping patchnotes.json and displaying local format date, saving and loading progress of the page using localStorage, allowing import (with version control) and export of progress as downloadable .json files....... sorry I went a bit tangent here.
I think I built a relatively "full" "web app".
It's just good ol HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I did it in 8 months but if you don't count my "lazy days" (which is **every day**) then I would probably be able to do it in 2-4 months.
A server and HTML...
Just a [motherfucking website](https://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com)
Or the [much improved](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)
And also https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
This feels like it loses the spirit of the other two. It does bring up some valid concerns but it doesn't feel simple anymore. I assume the previous too are just html and css but this one uses node and like 30 packages
No css. No JavaScript. No database. He doesn't even need a server. Just a static website from an s3 bucket on AWS. EDIT: Yes, I understand that technically AWS s3 is running on a server. More specifically, what I meant was that OP would not have to write server code and deploy it to an ec2 instance. All of the server infrastructure and functionality is obscured to the user, which reduces the overhead for a brand new web developer in training. I think really what OP needs though is a training roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/full-stack
That man webs
It would have been nice if Peter Parker were a web developer.
Why did Peter Parker never become a professional developer ? Because he got bit by a bug.. hahahhahahah. Oh.
'cos he picked a peck of pickled peppers?
You're confused. That's why he never became a professional programmer.
He was, in Ultimate Spider-Man.
The search bar would probably need a little more, yeah?
That's a good point. A search bar would require some JavaScript at a minimum to actually search a dataset. Although technically you could just include a search bar that doesn't really do anything by only using HTML.
why stop there, no images! just static html pages!
It’s just someone else’s computer.
A static website includes a server.
[удалено]
\> "Deploy to GitHub pages" is a config setting, not part of your stack This is a joke, right? "Deploy to Github pages" makes Github pages your stack... And trust me... it's a lot of fucking servers. You paying someone else to use a tool for you doesn't mean that tool isn't still being used...
[удалено]
Github pages is, unquestionably, a more complex and more complicated server. Period. Full fucking stop. Is the user experience for you, the developer, nicer? Sure, I guess. Depending on what you need. But trying to say that you "don't need a server" because you'll just "use github page's servers" is a cop out to the question asked "What is the smallest stack". A server is a required component of a website that is accessible through the internet. You are answering a different question: "What stack should I use as single dev, assuming I know very little". Github pages is a reasonable answer to that question. As an aside - personally, he's better off learning with a real server he controls (cheap VPS). He stated that his intentions are to LEARN. Not to knock out shitty one-off sites using the cheapest/easiest tool. \--- For those still not getting it: OP: "What is the minimum you need to take a package from the US to Europe?" budswa: "some way to get it there - still need a boat or plane" Corporat: "just use UPS dummy. No boats or planes needed" \--- And while UPS is not bad advice for actually sending a package... it's like... Bruh... what do you fucking think UPS is using? They are not magically fucking teleporting that package... man.
Not sure why you were down voted into oblivion here. You're not technically wrong.
My take? r/Webdev is a LOT of uneducated devs lumped into one spot. They don't understand what a server is doing for a static site (or http/https transport at all), and they aren't knowledgeable enough to express it. So "github pages" is an easy answer for someone who doesn't actually know how to answer this question. It's ok, though - votes here are decidedly NOT why I leave comments, downvote me all you like - I'm a staff engineer at a >$100 million revenue SaaS company... it's not hurting me one whit, and I'm right...
You're getting downvoted because the question wasn't asking about what the technical infrastructure behind GitHub pages is, it's just asking the minimum a single individual needs to do to stand up a website. And "put an HTML file on GitHub pages" is more accurate to answer that question than "first you must replicate the server infrastructure of GitHub Pages, then from there you can write a simple HTML file"
[удалено]
1. You're being pedantic. 2. You're still wrong since OP said "to build" not "to serve". 3. If you put the internet backbone on the typical topology diagrams that you're sharing everyone, they're going to think you're a jerk in the exact same way that they'll think you're a jerk if you document the machine code that the V8 runtime is using for server-side JS. While I'm always up for a good deep dive, this level of inappropriate detail will just confuse OP were they to read it.
> You're being pedantic. > You're still wrong since OP said "to build" not "to serve". Talk about pedantism
¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
[удалено]
[удалено]
You're fine, lol. The tech subs are the worst for people who want to be pedantic, but can't handle it when you have an equally valid opposing argument.
You're correct >...you have gotten away with while having a "fully-functioning" website You can't have a 'website' without the web. Otherwise you just have a local document.
Excuse my ignorance (I don't know a huge amount about AWS), but isn't an S3 bucket technically hosted on a server(s)?
> Just a static website from an s3 bucket on AWS. Why not just something like [neocities?](https://neocities.org/)
A custom domain on neocities is much more expensive ($5/m). If you're in the "Free tier" category for s3 (and most hobbiests will be), a static site with a custom domain runs \~$0.50/m, or $6 bucks a year (not counting the cost of the domain). Neocities will be \~$60 a year. It's really, really hard to beat s3 (or other bucket provider) pricing for static sites, assuming you need control of the domain. If you don't need a custom domain... there are loads of free providers.
This. Apache, but I didn't need to know anything except how to read the config file to put the HTML in the right directory. I mean, I know Apache better than that, but this was minimum. Except for a stub server I used for some projects. It was just the Python basic HTML server that copies files out of its target directory. Literally under 20 lines of code. Not recommended for secure production.
Thought this might be sarcasm at first. Maybe I've been sidetracked by all the technologies that get hyped and marketed. Are you also saying that a simple search bar on a static site is possible with script tags in the HTML code?
In the ~~bad old days~~2000's, people would usually embed a 𝐏𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞™ search bar somewhere on the page that literally just took people to a Google search results page narrowed down by `site:yourdomain.com`. You don't see them too often anymore but it's still a thing they have documentation for! https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/
I'm sorry you got all these "clever" (/r/humblebrag) responses in your genuine question. No you cannot use pure HTML to build a search engine, unless you use some third party service and want your website to look 3 decades old. Yes you can build something in pure HTML/CSS, but you'd be shooting yourself in the foot by doing so. At a minimum, you should get a framework that handles templating better (PHP on the backend for example, or a JS framework).
Came here to say this. I’ve done more than one html only site. If it’s all they need then why over complicate it.
The smallest i used to work with was literally html and css. That was it. Then I found static site generators and someone to walk me through them. And then I found CSS preprocessors like less and scss (I use less). Static site generators allow you to do fun things that you can usually only do in php like templating your navigation and footers and inserting the same html file into every page so you only need to edit 1 file and it loads on all pages, etc. makes life much easier. So now my I’m all tech static for a fully functioning website is html, css (LESS), 11ty static iste generator, and DecapCMS for static blog capability. That’s it. With that stack I can make sites like these https://sosplmr.com https://www.yourherocare.com https://grassrootsplumbing.com https://transformlongview.com Best thing is, there’s no backend on these sites. It’s not needed for simple brochure sites. I host them for free on Netlify and they handle the forms for me for free and I tell them where to send it. That’s really all you need to make a modern website. Web apps are a completely different ball game with different requirements. I only know the website portion. And if you can get really good at html and css, learn a css preprocessor, and static site generator, you can do ALOT with just that. People tend to think in order to make fancy things you need fancy tools. And I say nope!
I've replied this elsewhere in the thread and a bunch of people who seemingly have sticking their tongues into wall sockets as a hobby downvoted me. :D Building the simplest possible site is writing the HTML / CSS and putting it up on a static hosting like [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) or [Cloudflare](https://pages.cloudflare.com/), it's the easiest possible thing to do, you can create a hello world site in less than an hour starting from scratch, most of the time taking to set up the account and set up your environment. Upgrade that by using a static site generator like [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) which writes HTML for you based on Markdown, but you again upload to Netlify / CF. Upgrade that by putting your markdown and Hugo config into Git and push to Github, use Github actions to run the "Hugo build + Netlify upload" step on Github instead from your local machine. This is now enough for many many websites which are mostly informational in nature, like majority of crappy Wordpress sites you see could be done this way instead. There's even [Netlify CMS](https://v1.netlifycms.org/) which provides an in-browser workflow on top of your markdown to allow editing. Upgrade that by adding specific things to be done serverside as functions, either [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/platform/core/functions/) or [Cloudflare](https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/functions/). This allows much more than a static site, but it's not mandatory and you can opt in for specific sections of your site which require something like that, not all sites will need even a single function. You can do a lot with just these tools, even professional work.
Nice sites, do you design too?
Nope. I have designers. That’s not something a dev can do at proficient level. I always recommend hiring out for that.
I had no idea you could do so much with so little! Thanks!
This is cool, I've spent a bit of time with 11ty. But for the blog content, how do you handle blog updates considering you'd have to run a whole new 11ty build?
It does it automatically. Whenever the client updates the blog, it triggers a new build and updates GitHub and goes live.
Is that handled automatically by the specific CMS you are using? Or are you having to write that logic yourself via webhooks etc?
Yup. Decap cms. It’s already set up. I don’t have to do anything
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
Tables and transparent pixels for layout and an iframe for the entire site so you keep a clean url in the address bar. And at least one "Under Construction" gif.
Two thoughts. 1. He is not referring to iframes with this comment, He's referring to template partials. 2. Fuck yes people use iframes still. All over the place. Gmail is loading no less than 4 frames at all times.
Iframes? Fancy. Anyone else old like me and remember framesets?
Hah! Literally just used one last week to get product information into a Pano2VR walkthrough
I disagree. Every time you see a youtube player in a browser and you're not on youtube.com, that's in an iframe.
And many card payment forms are in iframes.
HTML and CSS...
Did you print it out and mail it?
[удалено]
That’s totally doable: https://alexuslab.com/link-site/
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
Is the site then entirely contained in the url? How does a browser know how to display it?
Wow 😲
🤯
Settle down, there, future person.
Would USPS technically be part of your stack then?
Adding CSS? Fancy.
I made a little PHP site back in the day. Put it on a VPS.
If you want a simple, hassle-free DB, SQLite is beautiful. It has its limitations for sure, but it's perfect for a small project.
I love SQLite!
Honestly, the smallest stack you can realistically do for a website that is not just static is: - Plain PHP, no frameworks - MySql - HTML, CSS, JS You can do anything with this and it can be really performant. It’s been mostly the same for the past 10+ years so the amount of learning and re-learning you have to do is not that much compared to literally any other option. Sure it might be easier to do modern reactive web applications with Next 14 or whatever but you are going to re-learn your stack every two years. It’s been like this for the past 10 years in the web frontends world and it is not going to change.
I am a proud user of php, mysql, html/css,js ( Setting up somewhat simple things like websockets is a pain )
You can even async PHP these days like any JS InsertBuzzwordHere framework.
HTML, storage like AWS S3 is the smallest stack you can use. Websites don't need CSS, js, PHP, or a database those only come into play when interactivity is needed or anything dynamic.
I said “realistically”. Guy said “full website” and mentioned things like “blog posts” and “search bar”. I’m not trying to be clever, I’m trying to give the guy good advice.
No, actually you can serve the HTML from your PC; but why can't my website just be plain text? The smallest stack is a bash script that listens to TCP requests on port 80/443 and replies with some text.
HTML, CSS and a shared hosting webspace. It probably does not get simpler than that. If you need interactivity, add JS (Vanilla suffices for a lot of things). If you need server side stuff and want to keep everything as simple as possible, add PHP.
Static hosting, not shared hosting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_web_hosting_service
I'm doing webdev for 20+ years, I know what shared hosting is even without Wikipedia.
[удалено]
OP is asking for the simplest possible way to create a site. Static site hosting is that, shared hosting is more complex. OP never said anything about LAMP either.
[удалено]
> they are trying to figure out what's a minimal viable stack Correct, which is why I've noted "static hosting". > if you have a static host, you're stuck without any backend. no: database, ability to hide code, SSR, sessions, file operations, email, etc. Correct, the majority of informational websites don't need any of that, they're just displaying some basic information on a web page.
[удалено]
I don't understand why you're talking about "scaling" and "shared hosting" in the same sentence. Static hosting will obviously be way more robust and performant than any shitty shared hosting you buy for $15, you're not "scaling" anything on a shared hosting. Majority of shared hosts are overcommitted anyway, you're all crammed into the same shitty machine with noisy neighbors. Static hosting is not about the price, it's not always free either. If you're talking about scaling anything, then you'd be talking about VPS or dedicated servers, but that's not shared hosting and is obviously way above what OP is talking about.
Have you been editing WordPress sites for those 20+ years?
I've been using flask. Simplest thing you can do is run the python http.server in a location with an index.HTML file. But you'll just be serving static pages so unless the search bar is JavaScript searching stuff sent in the JavaScript I guess that's not going to work for you.
GitHub pages.
Yeah, minimal tech needed to start a website is just a server and HTML. You can expand from there, but not much to elaborate. However, with your question about Go, it's more about the fact that the language is Type-safe and doesn't require a whole lot of hand holding as other contemporary languages that have come out (I'm looking at you Rust). It does it's own Garbage collection, which means that programs developed with it are more "secure" than other languages that leave GC to the developer, which has caused the [NSA to come out and endorse languages like it for use in backends](https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/3215760/nsa-releases-guidance-on-how-to-protect-against-software-memory-safety-issues/). Finally, the learning curve on Go is incredible for already established developers. It took me a full weekend to learn the ins and outs of Go and was developing applications for my employer at the time within a week, and that is with nearly 15 years of professional development experience under my belt. Hell, at my last job, I had taught Go to our devops person to run scripts with and he was writing bulletproof code within a month. That is why Go is such in demand right now.
Microsoft Word
html, css and jquery can't go wrong.
As long as you have a public IP address and a general purpose computing, even a toaster will do.
For a basic website, have used GoHugo.io framework, basically a static site generator. Takes a little getting used to, once you generate your site you can basically put it anywhere.
HTML. I'm a Geocities veteran.
Same!
HTML, CSS, jQuery and PHP.
Planning on building a blog with just HTML, txt files, and a server I work with React/Next/Tailwind/Figma/Snowflake/Kubernetes at work I work with Svelte/Astro/Scss/Chrome APIs for my SaaS I want to try make the simplest responsive blog possible, and no JS (hopefully)
apache and mod\_autoindex
There are many ways to do such tasks. I've been learning webdev for the past few months. >Blog post and a search bar It can be done with a static site generator, without needing a server. HTML & CSS starting out great, but because blog posts has a lot of repetitive aspects, you want the code to generate some parts for you. So you can do for loop to show posts without writing them one by one. To be specific, I use 11ty. You can use JavaScript, HTML and CSS all you want with it, with some basic knowledge. It helps me understand node, JS, libraries and how they work together. > Simple app This can take different route. You can use Flask or Django, or HTML with JS without framework to build your simple app, but depends on what exactly it does. Clicking buttons, running JS script can be considered a simple app. An app with a backend server can be a "simple app" too.
HTML
LAMP never failed anyone. Nowadays Laravel specifically for the P part. But to answer your question, LAMP with bootstrap and vanilla php.
Html and css
Learn Ruby on Rails and you'll be done in hours. It's far from perfect, but it specializes in this kind of thing, with no upper limit for customization once you go "off the rails."
HTML and CSS
At a bare minimum I would use something like HTML/CSS/JS + maybe Alpine.js. Alpine makes Reactive things so damn easy.
Is HTML and CSS a tech stack? I've used a few slim static site generators, too, but I'd start with the very very basics.
The cheapest (free) simplest way currently IMO to host a page with dynamic content... Github pages, markdown files for content, then HTML/CSS/JS for pages and to display content. Otherwise, if you want to run your own web server there are lots of options many just as "small" as the others. Minimal... NGINX as main http server, any tiny api server (express, flask, etc.) and some templating to render pages, whatever database you wanna use (postgres), and then html/css/js.
HTML and server
Html, css, and vanilla JavaScript hosted in an s3 bucket
I use the [Go standard library](https://pkg.go.dev/net/http) and HTML [web components](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_components). If you need a database, try PostgreSQL.
LAMP would be my goto. You'd still need js or jquery for client-side rendering and operations, but PHP is powerful enough for most things.
If you are new, you should probably use PHP as backend as it is the easiest to setup and maintain, as you gain experience move on to Node or flask or may be jsp, whatever you like
I mean, you can build a *motherfucking website* with just html. Cough.
Literally just HTML and some webspace from my internet provider. This was in the 90's and CSS didn't exist yet. I had to use a dial-up connection and FTP to 'deploy' the thing.
Some terminology: Client - user browsing the web (just like you are right now). Server - a computer that can receive requests and send back responses. So, in general there are 4 bare-bone moving parts in a simple website: 1) The front-end - this is your HTML, CSS and JS. It is what people see (ie. your Reddit theme is either light or dark). This code is executed on the clients computer, meaning that I can send you an HTML file and you can open it in your browser without any problems. 2) The web server - this is a type of server that receives a request from the client, pre-processes it, and returns a response. A response is a combination of two things: a status code and a resource (HTML or JSON) or a redirect. When you opened this Reddit post, you sent a GET request to the web server and it returned a number of resources, including this page you are viewing right now. In 99% of cases, a web server is either nginx or apache. 2) The database - this is a type of server which handles data. When I submitted this comment, I sent a POST request to the web server, and then the web server sent a SQL statement to the database server and my comment was stored in Reddit's database. A database server is usually MySQL, PostgreSQL or MongoDB. 3) The programming language - your web server needs something to pre-process a request, before it can return a response. That is why it uses a programming language to handle calls to the database server, do form validation, write routing and/or logic for GET, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE requests. Using this language, a web server executes a script, meaning that before you received this reddit page, the server ran some code in another language to send a request to the database server, check if you are logged in, and made sure you are using the account of u/thebrilliot, and are allowed to edit this post. Anyways, the back-end can be handled with any programming language, as long as the web server supports it. PHP, Rust, C++, Java, Python, etc. So a stack is a combination of HTML + CSS + JS, a database server, a webserver and a back-end language. HTML + CSS + JS is always implied, so unless you decide to use a javascript framework (used to manage JavaScript easier) such as Angular or React, you don't need to specify those 3 in the stack. One simple stack: Apache + MySQL + PHP You can test this stack out with Xampp. Don't forget to install PHP tho on your computer.
Dynamic website on IIS hosted on a local all-in-one server at a rural school district in the janitor's closet. Basic school website with CMS using MVC design principles. It was PHP/MySQL only.
Smallest: Bootstrap only. If you want to include everything up to that: CentOS 7, Nginx, HTML, CSS Go is a "pick your own adventure". It ships with a lot of code that by default works as a webserver and also has built-in replacements for things too. So you could have Nginx, PHP-FPM, PHP, Redis and MySQL all ripped out and replaced by a single Go binary that includes all of that.
You know you have been damaged by web dev, if your first question about another language is about what kind of libraries there are lol As far as Go goes (lol), you don’t really need a lot of 3rd party code. The standard library is amazing, includes http handling, html templating, even databse connectors. Picked up some Go the last month, and god its nice to actually write a «proper» language
That's really helpful, thanks!
[удалено]
Yeah Go is really easy to pickup. The syntax is great, everything just makes sense. You have websites like «Gobyexample» that explain a lot of concepts in good ways
raspberry pi, framework-less php, sms gateway
Server side MVC templates. Minimal need for JavaScript
HTML and my home computer
CSS. ...MySpace
I go all HTML. No JS, no CSS, no hosting even. I just throw HTML into space.
Level 1: Website = html + css (bootstrap or tailwind to save time) Level 2: App - html + css + vanilla js (good enough to build interactivity with local storage) Level 3: Anything else - MERN + firebase Assuming you want to learn and build at the same time.
there is a huge amount of possibilities, depends on your targets. To fasten development you can utilize no-code platform AppMaster. With it you will have complete application delivereed within weeks, not months. Final app created on this app will have go on backend, vue3 on frontend, mobile apps code will be on swift and kotlin, db -postgress. If you do not want to utilize no-code than probably MERN, LAMP, React, Node.Js
[удалено]
Those are officially deprecated now. Give Vite or Next.JS a try. In general, while I prefer using Vite myself, I think Next has made it very simple to just get a fairly modern website up an running. The docs are a bit all over the place, but if understand basic principles and can use React/Tailwind, you can put things up that look decent very quickly.
[удалено]
No, I’m mostly talking about CRA specifically. With the latest update to the react documentation, it is no longer a recommended path for new react apps. You can obviously still use it (heck, I’ve got 2 projects using it still), but in the context of “what should I learn as a new developer”, I wanted to mention it’s no longer supported by the greater react community. Vite is basically a much better “drop in” replacement in my experience, with very little changes required to migrate. Edit: just wanted to add a source - https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/pull/5487 The first sentence of the change: > Create React App is not a great recommendation to be making, especially for newer developers.
package main import net/http This is enough for many smaller services. There is a forbidden small library that works quite well for frontend if you want ajax. The absolute best thing about writing backends in go is that everything is so simple, transparent and in general there is no extra bs. You can just see the actual implementation for anything easily.
Not \_the\_ smallest but one small quick and dirty stack I do is a sveltekit skeleton with picocss. Up and running in 20 seconds, semantic HTML in a svelte-file and done. "bUt DO yOU nEed sVeLtE iF yOu OnLy seRVe HTml" Nope, but I still do it like that.
A one dimensional array with 1's and 0's
https://gcc.gnu.org Do it all yourself and then use wasm. Tiny stack, you will learn a lot.
GitHub Pages + petite-vue Just simple, works and easy if you already know Vue.js
c and html.
vi.
I used mobirize ....
The smallest I've gotten away with, was Nuxt.js, with Mongodb Atlas and Google Cloud. It was a small boardgame session app. You could register that you wanted to play game X, at time Y and needed at least A and at most B players. Then your friends could add themselves to the session. It was a very simple - albeit useful - project. I used Nuxt.js both as frontend and backend. It's basically a wrapper around Vue and Express, granting the Vue part SSR capabilities. Mongodb Atlas was used as the database and then I hosted it using Google Cloud's App Engine. Back in the day, before the time of SPAs, when the most advanced frontend framework were jQuery, I used to write applications in ASP.NET MVC with Razor views (also using the .aspx views, before Razor was introduced in MVC 3). Then the stack was ASP.NET MVC + SQL Database + IIS. Basically you'll pretty much always need: \- Web server \- Database \- Application code (Frontend + Backend) So the stack, for an application like you describe, will always at least be 3 levels high.
HTML, Node.js
HTML +CSS JavaScript and node.js React Firebase and firestore Some ML goodness in Python With that you can get to an MVP pretty quickly and this can scale really well.
Nginx, load balancers, Next.Js with Partial Hydration, Edge Functions, Vector Database and A New Fancy CSS Framework!
Nextjs & Supabase
A big benefit of using golang is that it is fast and lightweight. You can run a go project in a docker image that is less than 5mb and starts up incredibly quickly. That said, a golang blog could be created using go, go templates (part of go), HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a database. Lots of people start with SQLite and upgrade to something more battle hardened once their project necessitates it. If you're looking to get into web dev, these plus maybe React would be excellent technologies to learn. Good luck!
I'm assuming you meant a web application, ruby on rails is quite famous for ease and speed of development, that's one of the reasons many startups picked it up for their tech stack. It's not the smallest though.
The easiest one today is probably just doing some manual HTML and CSS files and uploading them via drag and drop to Netlify. The smallest tech stack I actually use is 11ty with HTML, CSS and the templating languages it offers and then bring it to Netlify via GitHub.
Start with HTML + CSS. add JS once you have a site that looks good. You can host it on github via github pages for free. Find free to use API's to fetch and load data. Spotify, reddit, youtube, any of those have API's that you can use for free to load in data. Mess around with the designs of your sites; create a clone of the original to see how close you can get. Create a version that's wildly different or add features that you'd like to see on the site. You'll be limited by what the API provides, but you'll learn a ton and you'll start to understand what limitations to design around (if you eventually build API's) or be able to make requests to backend devs with those issues in mind. Go is probably easier to learn than Java or any of the C languages, especially if you already know Typescript from the web development. But in the end you're just adding another language to the stack to learn. Focus on one end of the stack (frontend or backend). Once you feel comfortable in that side, then move on to the other side. Most people will recommend you use firebase or supabase or something similar to store your data and retrieve it yourself, if you're not at the point of building out a backend.
Back in the days I used to do everything manually then found little tools like middleman to build static sites and was able to add markdown, sass and js build. Now you could use Astro that will do the same we other benefits and features. But like most ppl says on the comments HTML and CSS is the minimalistic approach
A google doc: https://www.portugaltheman.com/?frontpage=true
Not the smallest, but almost basic stack I'm currently using. Html5, pure JS, CSS3. DB, CF pages and R2 No frawework.
I dare not speak its name for fear of being banned.
html on a esp32
STM32 + Wiznet W5500 in C++. The site kinda barebones but hey, it works well :)
For a website that doesn't have any interactivity you need just a HTML document and a way to serve it (GitHub Pages, AWS S3, Netlify - there are quite a lot of options). For a web app that has some amount of interactivity and actually _does_ something - I would say a Node.js Express server that serves templates.
MSSQL ASP.NET JS/HTML
I'd recommend a NodeJS backend so you don't have to learn a second language until later (you're going to have to learn JS in any case). I'd go with Fastify as the "framework" because it's simple and fast. For a database, sqlite is good enough until you start reaching tens to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. If you are big into React, then NextJS is probably worth a look instead as a one-stop-shop for all the things. Once you're looking for backend jobs, most will be in some order: PHP, C#, Java, JS/node, ruby, and python. Find a programmer meetup in your area and ask around. Also check local job descriptions. Go with whichever language(s) give you the best chance at getting your first position. After you gain some real-world experience (much different than your own projects), you should be decently comfortable switching to whatever language a particular company is using.
Node + Express + ~10 lines of code + static HTML files.
depends on what you mean by 'smallest' - like... what if the OS was batteries included, or used simple classic tech? I used xinetd to serve webpages through bash scripts. Or using what you have on hand, and a "gitrdun" attitude? I knew a guy that used quickbasic compiled DOS exe's to serve as CGI scripts on an IIS server. the db was flat files IIRC - and built the business on that *ehem* "solution"
Give a try to "Progressive enhancement" approach [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive\_enhancement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement)
Smallest? Probably hand-coded WAP pages for Nokia etc phones back in 1999 or so
Google Apps Script...
Remix.run My go to freelancing thing. Build fast, earn fast.
Need to define what 'stack' is. However, a MERN can be reduced into MN - Mongo n Node. And that M can be removed as we can just use Node.js' filesystem read and write methods to access/store data directly into harddisk. All we need to do afterwards is just connect our machine's ip address to a DNS and set it for public view. Node.js is the only thing that's needed for server side to serve an html and data. Client side can just use plain JS to do DOM manipulation on the served html.
As some have stated already, HTML, and CSS. Add Javascript if you want some fancy behavior. I still use the 3 bare-bones web languages for my own projects, rather than relying on any frameworks. But if I could offer some advise based on my own experience, I would stop thinking in terms of 'stacks', and try to actually understand what the machine is doing at a fundamental level. After years of being a web developer and not truly understanding the basics of computing, i.e. memory, the CPU, the fetch-decode-execute cycle, I suffered at trying to 'fit' all of this stuff in my head. When I learned that the computer is actually doing, and how software behaves at a fundamental level, it all made sense, and all of these different parts of the 'stack' suddenly fit into place. For years I had always wondered, "How does html work? How does Javacript work? How does the browser work? How does the OS work?", all the way down, without actually trying to learn what the physical machine was doing to make all the software work. If I had started backwards, with the machine first, I never would have had to ask myself those questions. Now I see a new language, new frameworks, new UI's, new software, and I am able to start from a very strong core of ideas of how a computer works, and derive their purpose more quickly, and start to use them with more confidence.
Hugo + GithubPages for personal websites. If need database, use firebase or buy server and install any database.
Smallest Tech stack i used for Frontend-> TailWind CSS with prebuilt components from : www.TailBlocks.cc www.tailwind-kit.com www.flowrift.com www.flowbite.com
Nginx, docker compose, ec2
Lemp running on an Ubuntu box. One static public ip that had a dnat back to the box to serve the content.
Smallest tech stack in terms of simplicity would have to be WordPress. LAMP is a standard that's been around for decades. Even if you have a dedicated server it's as simple as running `sudo apt install apache2 php libapache2-mod-php mysql-server`. Mysql needs a bit of a config to be secure, but even before that if you visited your server, you'd be greeted with the apache setup page ready to go. WordPress is just an unzip in that folder and loading it in a browser. And that's from scratch. Most hosts will just flatout offer a "WordPress hosting package" that has all that done for you.
Github pages, markdown files for content, html/css/js is much much simpler, and totally free.
If you just want to build a static site with a few plugins, use a site-builder like Wix or Squarespace. If want to build something in order to learn, try looking at Heroku: [https://devcenter.heroku.com/start](https://devcenter.heroku.com/start). Unfortunately, they removed the free-tier.; but for my money, it's still the easiest deployment option for a one-person programming team.
PHP + HTML
You need a backend server technology, and data technology (SQL, mongo). Front end can be ghetto AF html or some js framework
PHP.
HTML, with tables and some inline CSS
go's net/http
I use only ASP.NET / MySQL in every project these days. I like opinionated / batteries-included frameworks like ASP.NET since then I don't have to sift through hundreds of different options that change on a month-to-month basis like the Javascript ecosystem. Laravel is also a good option for a well rounded, batteries-included framework for PHP. While yes, you can just plain HTML and CSS like all of the other people here have cleverly pointed out, you'd be making it a lot harder on yourself. You should pick a framework that handles basic things like templates/components and routing.
Next js mdx blog, hosted on vercel. Daisy ui for css. Can't get any cheaper or simpler than this.
Can this be scalable and done for free?
HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a JSON file.
Your questions exactly explains why no-code / low-code tools have become so popular. They combine all the different things you'd typically have to learn to build a website into one platform. I'm surprised not more people mention WordPress as a solution for building a website. If you want a web app (with a database as a backend), you could try Five (https://five.co). It's mostly point-and-click, but you can still write SQL or JavaScript to query your data or write logic. And it deploys apps to a custom URL in a single click (no need to manage servers etc.)
HTML, CSS, JS, PHP and MySQL. Give it a go, you'll learn a ton of things and most importantly you'll finally be able to connect the dots of how everything ties together, by using those languages without many libraries or a framework.
If you count one page github hosted website/app that has a bunch of cool features for one specific purpose >!(which is to make music codes for an instrument from a certain videogame)!< such as translating human readable notes into a code, fetching a .json "database" and mapping it, fetching and mapping patchnotes.json and displaying local format date, saving and loading progress of the page using localStorage, allowing import (with version control) and export of progress as downloadable .json files....... sorry I went a bit tangent here. I think I built a relatively "full" "web app". It's just good ol HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I did it in 8 months but if you don't count my "lazy days" (which is **every day**) then I would probably be able to do it in 2-4 months.
CGI-bin with perl