Big list of HTTP static server one-liners

There is also devd: [1]

  devd .

[1]: https://github.com/cortesi/devd

Wow, didn't realize this was started in 2013

The ruby one with the -run option is a bit nonintuitive in how it works.

  $ ruby -run -ehttpd . -p8000

The -r option requires un.rb[1] which is a file full of convenience functions, such as httpd in this example. Classic Ruby.

Given that go has popularized long args with a single hyphen (-name etc), it is easy to mistake -run as an option by itself.

[1] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/master/lib/un.rb#L323

Some of these are multi-liners that can be converted to one-liners. For example I believe "npx" can be used for all the node examples for example "npx http-server -p 6007 ./root"

[edit] ahh i see this is called out in the gist comments

My favourite is thttpd [1] which is super tiny, battle-tested and actually meant for the job (and only this job). It's available as a package on most Linux distros.

Serving a static folder `/static` on port `3000` as user `static-user` and with cache headers set to 60 seconds would go like this:

  thttpd -D -h 0.0.0.0 -p 3000 -d /static -u static-user -l - -M 60

Even if you've got Python lying around on every Ubuntu server, I still don't get why you wouldn't use something leaner to serve your static files, as long as it's easy to install/configure. Same goes for most of the runtimes in that list.

[1] https://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/