Single Command Static File Web Server

March 12 2014

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:

Wireframing and protoyping
Javascript apps
Designers converting their PSDs into static templates who don't want to deal with build tools right away

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