This is a simple Docker image that just gives http responses on port 8000. It's small enough to fit on one floppy disk:
$ docker images | grep hell
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED VIRTUAL SIZE
crccheck/hello-world latest 2b28c6ad8d1b 4 months ago 1.2MBI made this initially because there were lots of scenarios where I wanted a Docker container that speaks HTTP, but every guide used images that took seconds to download. Armed with a tiny Docker image, I could test things in a fresh environment in under a second. I like faster feedback loops.
THANK YOU to the surprisingly large number of contributors that have made this better for everyone over the years.
$ docker run -d --rm --name web-test -p 80:8000 crccheck/hello-world
You can now interact with this as if it were a dumb web server:
$ curl localhost
<xmp>
Hello World
...snip...
$ curl -I localhost
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
$ curl -X POST localhost/super/secret
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>501 Not Implemented</TITLE></HEAD>
...snip...
$ curl --write-out %{http_code} --silent --output /dev/null localhost
200