Exposing a Local Directory Through a Web Server

Did you ever encounter a situation where you have to serve the contents of a directory in the local file system through a web server? Usually this scenario occurs when you want to quickly try out some HTML+JS+CSS combo, or when you want to temporarily share the directory with a remote user. How would you go about doing this? Setting up Apache HTTP server or something similar could take time. And you definitely don't want to be writing any new code for achieving such a simple goal. Ideally, what you want is a simple command, that when executed starts serving the current directory through a web server.

The good news is, if you have Python installed on your machine, you already have access to such a command:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

The last argument (8000) is the port number for the HTTP server. This will spawn a lightweight HTTP server, using the current directory as the document root. Hit ctrl+c to kill the server process when you're done with it.

Alternatively you can write your own solution, and install it permanently into the system so you reuse it in the future. Here's a working solution written in Go:

package main

import (
 "log"
 "net/http"
)

func main() {
 log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", http.FileServer(http.Dir("."))))
}

The port number (8080) is hardcoded into the solution, but it's not that hard to change it.