#python - simple http server

Sometimes it's convenient to run a very simple HTTP server just to serve web contents from your current directory.

In a system with Python ^⇗ installed (Mac OS & many Linux Distros come with Python out of the box), we can run a simple command in the current directory to serve its web content via localhost.

For instance:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

However, SimpleHTTPServer is not asynchronous and often can't serve many large files.

We can wrap the SimpleHTTPServer with Python's threading feature in SocketServer to achieve a simple server that's capable of async serving files. Reference: Multithreaded python simple http server ^⇗

#!/usr/bin/env python

import SocketServer
import BaseHTTPServer
import SimpleHTTPServer

class ThreadingSimpleServer(SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn, BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer):
    pass

import sys

if sys.argv[1:]:
    port = int(sys.argv[1])
else:
    port = 3000

server = ThreadingSimpleServer(('', port), SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler)
try:
    while 1:
        sys.stdout.flush()
        server.handle_request()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    print "Interrupted, exiting..."

Create a file named serve.py with content above in the current folder. Add the execute permissions

chmod +x serve.py

Then we can start serving the web content of current directory by running

./serve.py <<port>>

<<port>> is optional and set to 3000 by default. We can then access the web content by going to http://localhost:<<port>>