How to Host a Website on your Raspberry Pi

There are quite a few options when it comes to hosting a website on a Raspberry Pi. It really all depends on what kind of website you are looking to build.

My goal with this blog post is to educate you on some of the possibilities and, based on your needs, point you in the right direction.

Choose a Raspberry Pi Operating System

The first thing that you need to understand with hosting a website on Raspberry Pi is the fact that you are most likely running a Debian-based operating system. This is true if you are running Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu.

But what does that actually mean, and what advantage does it give you?

Well, because you are running a Debian operating system, you can pretty much do anything that you can do on Debian or Ubuntu on your Raspberry Pi.

So when looking for a website tutorial online, the tutorial doesn’t have to be specifically about a Raspberry Pi website. Instead, you can search for general tutorial about how to host a website on Ubuntu or Debian and it will still work on your Raspberry Pi.

This alone will open up the possibilities of your Raspberry Pi, and that’s not just limited to website hosting.

With that in mind, I want to give you a few options to get you started with your Raspberry Pi website.

If you don’t already have an operating system installed on your Raspberry Pi, I recommend following my tutorial on how to set up your Raspberry Pi.

Choose a Raspberry Pi Web Server

With that out of the way, the first thing you want to install on your Raspberry Pi is a web server.

Regardless of what type of website you end up making, you will need a web server to manage the incoming page requests, and generating the appropriate responses.

I recommend either Nginx or Apache in this case, and I’ve made tutorials specifically for each one of these web servers.

Options for Hosting a Website on Raspberry Pi

By no means is this a comprehensive list of Raspberry Pi website ideas, but it is a great way to help determine what type of website you want to build.

1) Static HTML/CSS Website

A simple static HTML website is a great way to learn the fundamentals of websites. You can take this a step further and spice up the way things look on the page with CSS.

2) Dynamic PHP Website

If you are already comfortable with HTML and CSS, you can make your web pages dynamic with PHP. Because PHP is a scripting language, you can, for example, insert and retrieve information from a database, whereas this is not possible with HTML alone.

3) Blog with WordPress

Now if you’re looking for something that doesn’t require any coding whatsoever, you can install WordPress or a similar content management system that gives you blogging functionality out-of-the-box. WordPress is fully customizable with thousands of downloadable themes and plugins that are super intuitive to incorporate into your websites.

4) Python Website with Django

Another options for your Raspberry Pi is to create a website with Python and Django. I worked with a company called Linode to create a full tutorial on hosting a Django website on Ubuntu, and like I said, any tutorial that is good for Ubuntu will be good for your Raspberry Pi.

How to Get Started

Now that you have a basic understanding of your options for hosting a website with Raspberry Pi, I suggest you first start by setting up your Raspberry Pi and then proceed to install a web server like Nginx.

Please let me know if you have any questions below.