Your own host

A minimal gallery is a folder of ordinary files once it is built, so any web host can serve it: a hosting plan you already pay for, your own server, a friend’s. This page covers building that folder, uploading it, and the few settings that help.

Build the site

When npm create minimalgallery@latest asks “Where will it live?”, pick My own host. The gallery is then set up to build for your host ("publish": "build" in package.json), and nothing about Cloudflare is written.

npm run publish

It processes any new photos and builds the whole site into the dist folder, inside the gallery folder. You can also use the admin’s Publish page, with Build for my own host selected.

Upload it

Upload everything inside dist to the folder your host serves the site from, often called public_html, www or htdocs. Use whatever your host provides: its file manager, an FTP or SFTP app such as Cyberduck or Transmit, or rsync if you have SSH access:

rsync -av --delete dist/ me@example.com:public_html/

--delete removes files the new build no longer has, such as the copies of a deleted photo. Without it they stay on the server, unused.

Resized photos keep their names until the photo itself changes, so after the first upload, an app that only sends new and changed files sends little.

What your host needs to do

Most hosts do all of this already:

• Serve index.html for a folder address. Every page of the gallery is a folder with an index.html file, such as japan-2025/index.html for /japan-2025/.
• Show 404.html for an address that does not exist, with a 404 status.
• Redirect an address without its trailing slash, such as /japan-2025, to /japan-2025/.

Then set site in minimalgallery.config.ts to the gallery’s address, such as https://photos.example.com, so the feeds, the sitemap and link previews point to it.

Cache rules

The resized photos and the site’s styles and scripts never change at a given address: a new version gets a new name. A browser can keep them for a year instead of asking for them again on every visit. The gallery works without this rule, but pages a visitor has seen before load faster with it.

On Apache, which most shared hosting runs, add a file named .htaccess to the gallery’s public folder. Each build copies it into dist.

public/.htaccess

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
  <If "%{REQUEST_URI} =~ m#^/(_mg|_astro)/#">
    Header set Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable"
  </If>
</IfModule>

On nginx, add this to the site’s server block:

location ~ ^/(_mg|_astro)/ {
  add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable";
}
error_page 404 /404.html;

For another server, ask your host how to set a Cache-Control header on the /_mg/ and /_astro/ folders.

Limits

minimal gallery sets none on your own host, and npm run doctor skips Cloudflare’s file limit for a gallery built this way. Check your plan’s disk space: each full-size photo adds about 1.5 MB of resized copies. See How many photos fit.