Hosting

Simple Gal produces a self-contained static site in dist/. There is no server-side processing, no database, no runtime. Any service that can serve files over HTTP will work.

GitHub Pages

The easiest option if your source is already on GitHub. See GitHub Actions for a complete workflow that builds and deploys automatically.

For manual deployment, push the contents of dist/ to a gh-pages branch:

# Build locally
simple-gal build

# Deploy to gh-pages branch
npx gh-pages -d dist

Then set the Pages source to the gh-pages branch in your repository settings.

Netlify

Connect your GitHub repository and configure the build:

The simplest approach is to build with GitHub Actions and deploy the dist/ directory. Alternatively, commit the built dist/ directory and point Netlify at it directly.

For drag-and-drop deployment without any repository, use the Netlify CLI:

simple-gal build
npx netlify-cli deploy --dir dist --prod

Vercel

Similar to Netlify. Connect your repository and set the output directory to dist.

For manual deployment:

simple-gal build
npx vercel --prod dist

Vercel will serve the static files without any framework configuration.

Amazon S3 + CloudFront

For AWS hosting:

# Build the site
simple-gal build

# Sync to S3
aws s3 sync dist/ s3://your-bucket-name --delete

# Invalidate CloudFront cache (if using a distribution)
aws cloudfront create-invalidation \
  --distribution-id YOUR_DIST_ID \
  --paths "/*"

Configure the S3 bucket for static website hosting and point CloudFront at it for HTTPS and caching.

Nginx

Serve dist/ directly. A minimal configuration:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name photos.example.com;
    root /var/www/photos;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/index.html =404;
    }
}

Copy the built site to the server:

simple-gal build
rsync -avz dist/ user@server:/var/www/photos/

Apache

Enable mod_dir (usually on by default) and point the document root at the output directory:

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

    <Directory /var/www/photos>
        Options -Indexes
        AllowOverride None
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

General advice

• HTTPS is required for PWA features. The service worker will not register over plain HTTP (except on localhost). Most hosting services provide free SSL certificates.
• No special server rules needed. Simple Gal generates clean index.html files in each directory, so standard static file serving works without URL rewriting.
• Cache headers are optional. The service worker handles caching on the client side. If you want to set server-side cache headers, long cache times on image files (/images/**) are safe since filenames include content hashes.