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Serve a Directory via Python

By David Walsh on July 6, 2015

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!

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Discussion

Hristo Chakarov
https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server
```
http-server
```
That’s even easier.

David Walsh
Nice!
Iain
Python comes preinstalled on number of OS’s though.

Python 3 has a different syntax too.

I think it’s
```
python -m http.server
```

Caleb
Except this only works under Python 2. The Python 3 command is slightly different.
```
python -m http.server
```
Corey Butler
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.
Joe Davison
You can also do this very easily with php:
```
cd ~/somewhere
php -S localhost:8888
```

Serve a Directory via Python

Recent Features

Create Spinning Rays with CSS3: Revisited

CSS Filters

Incredible Demos

background-size Matters

CSS :target

Discussion