Quick way to host a webserver on localhost

Question

I'd like to make the contents of a folder available at http://localhost:PORT/, temporarily. A very basic http server.

I already know about,

 $ python -m SimpleHttpServer 

or ( this seems like the new way )

 $ python -m http.server 

but I'm looking for alternate command-line methods.

Answer 1

There is no such thing like a "system' webserver in unix and different "methods".

You can install software on your system which contains a simple webserver and use it or not.

python -m SimpleHttpServer just loads the SimpleHttpServer module, which contains a basic webserver.

Something simliar exists for Perl, just have a look at CPAN: http://search.cpan.org/dist/HTTP-Server-Simple/

"Simple" is a solution for Java: http://www.simpleframework.org/

The same can be really easy achived with JavaScript and nodejs: http://nodejs.org/api.html , see the section about HTTP.

Another solution would be to do it yourself: HTTP is a really simple protocol, when it comes to only serve some static files. To get /foo/bar your browser will request it with:

GET /foo/bar HTTP/1.1

The reply should be in the following form:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Last-Modified: Tue, 10 Jan 2010 11:11:11 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

YOUR CONTENT

or

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Last-Modified: Tue, 10 Jan 2010 11:11:11 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

YOUR 404 ERROR PAGE

Include the Last-Modified header to enable caching of the ressources. It should be possible to write a minimal implementation of this in a few lines of code. Tie it to a port and you will have your webserver up and running. Use inetd or netcat to bind it to your IP.

Edit: Here is a simple shellscript which does exactly this job. It also supports generating an index for the folders and 404 error handling:

• SWS Manpage: http://prd4.wynn.com:8080/src/sws.8.html
• SWS Source: http://prd4.wynn.com:8080/src/sws.txt
• SWS Project Page: http://prd4.wynn.com:8080/README.html