How can I serve files with UTF-8 encoding using Python SimpleHTTPServer?

Question

I often use the following to quickly fire up a web server to serve HTML content from the current folder (for local testing):

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000


        

Answer 1

Had the same problem, the following code worked for me.

To start a SimpleHTTPServer with UTF-8 encoding, simply copy/paste the following in terminal (for Python 2).

python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer; m = SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.extensions_map; m[''] = 'text/plain'; m.update(dict([(k, v + ';charset=UTF-8') for k, v in m.items()])); SimpleHTTPServer.test();"

Ensure that you have the correct charset in your HTML files beforehand.

EDIT: Update for Python 3:

python3 -c "from http.server import test, SimpleHTTPRequestHandler as RH; RH.extensions_map={k:v+';charset=UTF-8' for k,v in RH.extensions_map.items()}; test(RH)"

The test function also accepts arguments like port and bind so that it's possible to specify the address and the port to listen on.

Answer 2

You can run it with Python scripts too.

from functools import partial
from http.server import SimpleHTTPRequestHandler, test
import os

print('http://localhost:8000/')
wk_dir = os.getcwd()
SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.extensions_map = {k: v + ';charset=UTF-8' for k, v in SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.extensions_map.items()}
test(HandlerClass=partial(SimpleHTTPRequestHandler, directory=wk_dir), port=8000, bind='')

---

Since test is not in http.server.__all__ so IDE may show a warning, and if you don't want to see it, you can use importlib instead of it. for example:

import importlib
http_server = importlib.import_module('http.server')
http_server.test(HandlerClass=partial(SimpleHTTPRequestHandler, directory=wk_dir), port=8000, bind='')