Stuck on Generate, empty Activity Log, Cancel doesn’t do anything

I ran into a problem and finally found a solution. I thought I’d post it in case anyone else runs into the same thing.

I tried running Simply Static for the first time. It looked like it started generating an export, but there was nothing in the Activity Log. I waited, still nothing. Tried to cancel, nothing happened. Tried restarting the web server; still nothing.

I found a similar issue posted in the forum, but the poster’s issue was resolved by setting the HTTP Basic Authentication. That made me think that maybe the problem was with Simply Static not being able to communicate with itself directly, on the server.

I’m running the site in Docker and I’m mapping the container’s internal webserver port (80) to another port on my laptop (8080). I think the problem is that Simply Static tries to talk to itself, via http requests, and is using port 8080. That won’t work inside the container, since the port is 80.

I set the internal port in the container to 8080 (so the internal and external port are the same), and suddenly the export worked.

I’m assuming Simply Static was getting an error when trying to talk to itself and I’m not sure why it didn’t indicate that in an error message, and cancel the export.

Anyway, hope that helps someone!