Simple file server to serve current directory

Question

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.

Solution 1

python3 -m http.server

or if you don't want to use the default port 8000

python3 -m http.server 3333

or if you want to allow connections from localhost only

python3 -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1

See the docs.

---

The equivalent Python 2 commands are

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 3333

There is no --bind option.

See the Python 2 docs.

Solution 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 --bind 127.0.0.1 8080
• Python 2: python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

Note that Python 2 has no --bind option, so it will allow all connections (not just from localhost).

Solution 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.

Solution 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 ''.

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Comments

[Kyle Maxwell]

You should probably post this over on serverfault.com instead.

[Alec]

ruby solutions: stackoverflow.com/questions/3108395/…

[vossad01]

Questions about "software tools commonly used by programmers" are on-topic. When you do web development (and even other types of development nowadays) you end up needing to access local files via HTTP. Perhaps this is still off-topic because it is asking for a tool recommendation, but I disagree on the closure reason given.

[Reactormonk]

I don't like piping into a shell.

[Joel Berger]

Ok then install via cpan: cpan -i Mojolicious or via apt (though it might be a little old. This is just a quick install script :-)

[alexm]

The one-liner version of that Mojolicious application would be: perl -Mojo -E 'a->static->paths(["."]);a->start' daemon

[nurettin]

I'd like to see number of folders and directories as well

[User9102d82]

does't work. I can't see any directories. I get an error page with mojo. what am i missing ?

[Adverbly]

There is also a directory argument in case you don't want the current dir: python3 -m http.server -d /path/to/web/dir