Simple file server to serve current directory

Question

Simple file server to serve current directory

I'm looking for a dead simple bin that I can launch up in the shell and have it serve the current directory (preferably not ..), with maybe a -p for specifying port. As it should be a development server, it should by default allow connections from localhost only, maybe with an option to specify otherwise. The simpler, the better.

Not sure which tags to use here.

python
ruby
perl
node.js
shell

Answer 1

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

or

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80

if you don't want the default port 8080. See the docs.

Answer 2

For Node, there's http-server:

$ npm install -g http-server
$ http-server Downloads -a localhost -p 8080
Starting up http-server, serving Downloads on port: 8080
Hit CTRL-C to stop the server

Python has:

Python 3: python -m http.server 8080
Python 2: python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

Note that these two allow all connections (not just from localhost). Sadly, there isn't a simple way to change the address.

Answer 3

There is the Perl app App::HTTPThis or I have often used a tiny Mojolicious server to do this. See my blog post from a while back.

Make a file called say server.pl. Put this in it.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use Mojolicious::Lite;

use Cwd;
app->static->paths->[0] = getcwd;

any '/' => sub {
  shift->render_static('index.html');
};

app->start;

Install Mojolicious: curl get.mojolicio.us | sh and then run morbo server.pl.

Should work, and you can tweak the script if you need to.

Answer 4

Using Twisted Web:

twistd --pidfile= -n web --path .  --port 8080

--pidfile= disables the PID file. Without it a twistd.pid file will be created in the current directory. You can also use --pidfile ''.