“Ad-hoc webserver” for static files on UNIX/MacOSX?

Question

Is there such a thing as a tiny little webserver that I can invoke from the command line that just fetches files from the local filesystem and serves them via HTTP on specific p

Answer 1

Python3 can serve the current directory via HTTP using http.server:

$ python3 -m http.server

Where

• python3 the current version of python
• -m stands for module
• http the http package
• http.server the server module (of the http package)

Per default, http.server listens on port 8000, but you can specify another like this:

$ python3 -m http.server 8080

Answer 2

If you have python installed:

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...

Answer 3

Apache HTTPD is built into Mac OS X - just switch on 'Web Sharing' in the Sharing Preferences.

To make it also work over port 8080, you'd need to add some configuration. See this article on Serverfault for starting point.

Answer 4

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer [port]

will start a webserver in the current directory serving whatever files are found there.

In a few cases this won't work well, for example the server is single-threaded (so no simultaneous downloads) and doesn't handle byte-range requests (clients expecting Range: support often fail badly).