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
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Using MooTools to Instruct Google Analytics to Track Outbound Links

    Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about who's coming to your website. One of the most important statistics the service provides is the referrer statistic -- you've gotta know who's sending people to your website, right? What about where you send others though?

  • By
    Vertically Centering with Flexbox

    Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we've long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be.  We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly...

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!