Deploy on Web Servers

If you have your own Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Raspberry Pi, you can host your Kiln site using any standard web server.

The process is simple:

1. Run ./kiln generate on your local machine (or on the server).
2. Upload the contents of the public folder to your server's web root.
3. Configure your web server to serve static files.

Below are the configuration snippets for the most popular web servers.

Nginx

Add this server block to your Nginx configuration (usually in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default).

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    
    # Point this to where you uploaded your 'public' folder
    root /var/www/kiln/public;
    index index.html;

    location / {
        # Try to serve the file directly, then as a directory (index.html), then 404
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    # Optional: Cache static assets for better performance
    location ~* \.(css|js|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
        expires 30d;
        add_header Cache-Control "public, no-transform";
    }
}

Apache

Ensure your VirtualHost points to the public directory. You may also need to enable the mod_rewrite module if you plan to do complex routing, but for standard Kiln sites, a basic config works.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/kiln/public

    <Directory /var/www/kiln/public>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Caddy

Caddy is arguably the easiest server to configure for static sites as it handles HTTPS automatically. Create a Caddyfile in your directory:

example.com {
    # Point this to where you uploaded your 'public' folder
    root * /var/www/kiln/public
    
    # Enable static file server
    file_server
    
    # Compress responses for speed
    encode gzip
}