Serve a Directory via Python

By  on  

Sometimes I'm working with a test HTML file and some JavaScript but need to work off of a served space.  In that case, I sometimes need to swap out folders within MAMP Stack which leads to a maintenance nightmare.  Bleh.

I recently found out that you can serve up a directory using one Python command line directive:

# Serves the current directory at:  http://0.0.0.0:8000/
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Excellent.  No more directory and MAMP Stack juggling.  Even better is that the command is easy to memorize so no need to constantly look it up.  Keep this in mind when you want to work on something without a big server install!

Recent Features

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    From Webcam to Animated GIF: the Secret Behind chat.meatspac.es!

    My team mate Edna Piranha is not only an awesome hacker; she's also a fantastic philosopher! Communication and online interactions is a subject that has kept her mind busy for a long time, and it has also resulted in a bunch of interesting experimental projects...

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: The amount of jQuery required to duplicate this effect is next to nothing;  in fact, there's more CSS than there is jQuery code!  Let's explore how we can duplicate jQuery's tooltip effect. The HTML The overall...

Discussion

  1. Hristo Chakarov

    https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server

    http-server

    That’s even easier.

    • Python comes preinstalled on number of OS’s though.

      Python 3 has a different syntax too.

      I think it’s

      python -m http.server
  2. Except this only works under Python 2. The Python 3 command is slightly different.

    python -m http.server
  3. Ever seen Fenix Web Server? I’m totally bias (I’m the author), but I think it works well :-) Has a GUI and a CLI, persistent servers, and an SSH tunneling tool for securely and temporarily sharing with others.

  4. You can also do this very easily with php:

    cd ~/somewhere
    php -S localhost:8888

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!