Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

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!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Context Menu with Dojo and Dijit

    Context menus, used in the right type of web application, can be invaluable.  They provide shortcut methods to different functionality within the application and, with just a right click, they are readily available.  Dojo's Dijit frameworks provides an easy way to create stylish, flexible context...

  • By
    Duplicate DeSandro’s CSS Effect

    I recently stumbled upon David DeSandro's website when I saw a tweet stating that someone had stolen/hotlinked his website design and code, and he decided to do the only logical thing to retaliate:  use some simple JavaScript goodness to inject unicorns into their page.

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!