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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools dwCheckboxes Plugin

    Update / Fix: The checkboxes will no longer toggle when the "mouseup" event doesn't occur on a checkbox. Every morning I wake up to a bunch of emails in my Gmail inbox that I delete without reading. I end up clicking so many damn checkboxes...

  • By
    dwClickable:  Entire Block Clickable Using MooTools 1.2

    I recently received an email from a reader who was really impressed with Block Clickable, a jQuery script that took the link within a list item and made the entire list item clickable. I thought it was a neat script so I...

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!