How to open compiled Flutter web index.html in browser locally?

Question

Running flutter build web creates index.html file in /build/web/ along with

assets                    icons                     manifest.json
favicon.png               index.html                version.json
flutter_service_worker.js main.dart.js

The current flutter channel is beta.

$ flutter channel

Flutter channels:  
  master  
  dev  
* beta  
  stable

flutter --version

Flutter 1.25.0-8.1.pre • channel beta • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision 8f89f6505b (2 weeks ago) • 2020-12-15 15:07:52 -0800
Engine • revision 92ae191c17
Tools • Dart 2.12.0 (build 2.12.0-133.2.beta)

When I try to open /build/web/index.html in the Chrome browser, it shows blank. Is it usual or do I need to install any node packages to make it run?

Note: I followed this doc https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/web.

Does it have anything to do with this code in index.html which does not seem to be included in the earlier flutter versions?

  <!--
    If you are serving your web app in a path other than the root, change the
    href value below to reflect the base path you are serving from.

    The path provided below has to start and end with a slash "/" in order for
    it to work correctly.

    Fore more details:
    * https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/base
  -->
  <base href="/">

Solution 1

you need to install node.js server from npm to run the website on.

npm install -g http-server

Change directory to /build/web and run the server on localhost with:

npx http-server

Solution 2

Adding to the topic, you can also use python to server it: Set up a local testing server

\[flutter_project]\build\web> python -m http.server

or

\[flutter_project]\build\web> python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Then go to localhost:8000