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Single Command Static File Web Server

I have been building a lot of Javascript apps lately. I started to prototype one recently, but I did not want to set up an Apache host or a connect server to run it. I found a little gem of a command that was already installed on OSX.

~/Projects/static-app > python -m SimpleHTTPServer

This was the perfect solution for me. SimpleHTTPServer is a Python library and when you send that to Python with the -m flag it tells Python to run the library as a script. Running this within the root of your static file project just fires up a web server at http://localhost:8000.

There is also a PHP version that will actually read a .htaccess file so you don't have to use Apache.

~/Projects/static-app > php -S localhost:8000

This is perfect for:

The next time you need something really basic to run a HTML/CSS/JS app try it out for a quick win.