What does it look like to run a Swift application on a server? When Swift was released as open source, it was released for Linux right away as well. Specifically, Swift favors the Linux flavor, Ubuntu. Hosting a Swift application is very different from traditional web hosting. If you get a web hosting package from companies such as GoDaddy, you will not see them say "Runs Swift 5". Most mainstream web hosters only offer scripting languages. The reasoning is simple:

• Most applications use scripting languages.
• Scripting applications can share the same server.

Swift, on the other hand, as a native language, is the actual web server itself. What that means is that your Swift application is directly responding to incoming requests. Let's look at the following aspects of server-side Swift:

• A self-contained server
• Linux/Ubuntu
• SwiftNIO
• Docker

Let's dive into it.