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Serve a Directory via Python

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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

  1. 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
  2. Caleb

    Except this only works under Python 2. The Python 3 command is slightly different.

    python -m http.server
  3. 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.

  4. Joe Davison

    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!