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Instant web server¶
Among the topics on our Linux list at work today was a question from Luke Fletcher that I was expecting to unleash a flurry of emotional responses:
What is the best small web server for testing site design and the like?
There were a couple of predictable rants about the benefits and drawbacks of threading models. Along with a couple of other topics entirely unhelpful for the question at hand, but surprisingly little dissent over the choices.
Matt Traner’s reply sums up the general feeling quite nicely:
Just use whatever server you have installed already. If you don’t have any installed grab nginx as it works well and is quite small.
I agree with Matt’s answer but I want to point a couple of possibly non-obvious web servers that they, and you, are likely to have installed already.
Busybox applet¶
All our Linux systems at the office include busybox, and in the configuration we use the httpd applet is built. It is very lightweight, and incredibly stable. I often use it when testing or as a weak way to transfer files between hosts when avahi isn’t available or is too much hassle. In my bash configuration I have a little functions to start up a busybox httpd server:
http_serve()
{
if [[ "${1}" == "--help" ]]
then
echo "Usage: ${FUNCNAME} [location]"
echo "Start a httpd in ‘location’, defaulting to ‘${http_serve_location}’."
return 1
fi
busybox httpd -f -p 8080 -h ${1:-${http_serve_location}}
}
http_serve_location is set elsewhere in my configuration file, so that I can
keep per-machine settings separate.
Python built-in¶
Python comes with its own basic web server, and it is very easy to use:
$ python2.6 -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 ...
kate.localdomain - - [13/Oct/2009 01:16:51] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
kate.localdomain - - [13/Oct/2009 01:16:51] "GET /css/content.css HTTP/1.1" 200 -
kate.localdomain - - [13/Oct/2009 01:16:51] "GET /css/design.css HTTP/1.1" 200 -
kate.localdomain - - [13/Oct/2009 01:16:51] "GET /css/pygments.css HTTP/1.1" 200 -
kate.localdomain - - [13/Oct/2009 01:16:51] "GET /css/microformats.css HTTP/1.1" 200 -
kate.localdomain - - [13/Oct/2009 01:16:51] "GET /css/print.css HTTP/1.1" 200 -
kate.localdomain - - [13/Oct/2009 01:16:51] "GET /css/voice.css HTTP/1.1" 200 -
$ python3.1 -m http.server 8080
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 ...
kate.localdomain - - [13/Oct/2009 01:17:23] "GET /2009/10/12/TaD-Instant_web_server.html HTTP/1.1" 200 -
Note that the name of the module has changed from SimpleHTTPServer to
http.server for Python v3 and above.
I’ve specified the port 8080 to both calls in the snippet above, by default the server port would be 8000. If port 8000 is acceptable for you then you can save yourself five keystrokes.
Ruby built-in¶
ruby also comes with its own web server, one that you’re probably already
familiar with if you’re a rails user, called webrick. We need a little script
to use webrick:
#! /usr/bin/ruby
require "webrick"
server = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(
:BindAddress => "localhost",
:Port => 8080,
:DocumentRoot => ARGV[0]
)
trap("INT") { server.shutdown }
server.start
This script will serve files from whatever directory is specified as its first argument.
Bonus¶
Python also comes with a CGI-capable version
called CGIHTTPServer and a XML-RPC server
called — this shouldn’t come as a surprise — SimpleXMLRPCServer. They’re
very useful for testing out ideas and concepts without having to set down lots
of code.
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