I am currently playing around with the HTML5 FileSystem API, and have a need to test my files served via a web server. I could setup a virtual director for my local apache server, but given the number of simple tests and experiments I do, I wanted something easier that required little to no configuration and setup.
So, I put together a super simple script that uses python’s SimpleHTTPServer class.
Here is the script (requires that python is installed and in your path)
#!/bin/bash
python -m SimpleHTTPServer $1
To use it, just switch the the directory that contains your files and run:
http
This will open a simple webserver on port 8000.
You can optionally pass in the port like so:
http 2030
Which will start a simple web server listening on port 2030.
Again, this is something really simple, but also very useful. If you need to quickly test a file, just switch to the directory and run the script.
Btw, another work around for playing with the FileSystem APIs would be to pass the:
--allow-file-access-from-files
to Chrome when launching it.
Update 2/1/2016 : For python 3, the command is:
python -m http.server PORT
and thus the bash script would be:
#!/bin/bash
python -m http.server $1
If I get some time, Ill update the script to just automatically detect the version of python running.
