trifold 0.4.0

A quick way to deploy static websites to a fast, cheap, and reliable CDN.

trifold

Quickly deploy static websites to a fast, cheap, and reliable CDN.

Installation

If you have uv installed, you can run uvx trifold without any separate installation step.

This is the recommended method, uvx is a built-in alias for uv tool run. (See https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/tools/#running-tools if you're curious to learn more.) The examples below will assume this method, but trifold should work fine with pipx, poetry, or any other standards-compliant Python package manager.

How it works

trifold is a tool to host & serve static websites using a content delivery network (CDN).

This allows painless deployment of sites consisting entirely of static assets (HTML, CSS, JS, images, etc.) for pennies a month.

The tool provides a simple CLI that allows:

• initializing new projects without touching the CDN web interface
• syncing local HTML/CSS/JS/etc. to the CDN & clearing the cache
• configuring a custom domain name to point at your files, with SSL enabled

This project grew out of my frustration with services making their free tier less friendly to indie devs & students that just need a cheap & reliable place they can host things.

Instead of relying on a free service it is hopefully going to be more stable to rely on a paid service with a reasonable price point and the ability to set billing limits.

bunny.net

At the moment, bunny.net is the only supported provider.

Like most hosts, they charge for storage & bandwidth. Storage starts at $0.01/GB/mo. bandwidth also starts at $0.01/GB/mo.

The typical static webpage is under 1GB, meaning storage costs will be negligible unless you decide to host audio/video. And if you do, the rates are far cheaper than most competitors, see their pricing for details.

In terms of bandwidth, let's say your page size is 2MB (a moderate-sized page) and hits the front page of a popular website, driving a surge of 25,000 hits. (Congrats!)

Not only will your site handle the traffic just fine, your total bill will be $0.50 for the 50GB of bandwidth used. (You could serve a million hits, ~2TB, for $20.)

Of course, most sites will only get a fraction of this traffic.

It is possible to host dozens of low-traffic sites for the $1/monthly minimum bill.

0. Create a bunny.net account & obtain your API key

If you'd like to sign up for bunny.net with the project's affiliate link, when you pay to host your site, we'll earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Once you have an account, visit https://dash.bunny.net/account/api-key to obtain your API key.

To use trifold you'll need to set the BUNNY_API_KEY environment variable:

$ export BUNNY_API_KEY=1234...    # replace with your key & be sure to keep it safe!

1. Initialize Project

First, your project needs a bunny.net storage & pull zone, and a local trifold.toml.

Generate one with:

$ uvx trifold init

This command will ask you a few questions:

• storage zone name: the name of the bunny.net storage bucket, must be unique. (example: trifold-website)
• region: primary region for file storage (default: Frankfurt, Germany)
• replication region(s): for an additional cost per region
• monthly bandwidth limit: avoid runaway costs by setting a bandwidth limit (default: 10GB)
• remote path: if you'd like to serve files under a subdirectory enter the name here (example: docs)
• local path: enter the (relative) local path to sync to the site (example: build/html)

a note about costs

Pricing starts at $0.01/GB, but additional replication or serving regions will increase this cost. See bunny.net's pricing page for details.

The default behavior is to only serve data from North America, which costs $0.01/GB in bandwidth. Other regions are available at an additional cost, and can be configured via the web interface (CDN->General->Pricing & routing).

2. Publish Your Files

With a zone created, we're ready to publish, but it's always a good idea to look before you leap-- let's check the status:

$ uvx trifold status -v

This shows us the files that will be uploaded or deleted.

As long as it shows what you're expecting, you're ready to publish:

$ uvx trifold publish

After a few seconds, your files are uploaded to the CDN.

They will be available at your-zone-name.b-cdn.net.

Whenever you want to publish changes, just repeat this step!

optional deletion

By default, for safety, this will only create or update files. If you'd like it to delete remote files that are no longer in your local directory add --delete.

This command will never modify your local files!

3. Custom Domain with SSL

If you have your own domain that you'd like to point at the hosted files, there's one more command to run:

Before you run this command, log in to your registrar and create a DNS CNAME or ALIAS record pointing your domain at your-zone-name.b-cdn.net.

Wait 5-10 minutes for DNS propagation, then:

$ uvx trifold domain-add example.com

This will configure an SSL certificate and force SSL.

Note: It is common to need to run this command more than once due to DNS/Certificate propagation delays. It is safe to run the command as many times as you need to, when you see the command succeed SSL should be available on your new hostname.